Facilities Operations Intern

Contributions:

• I wrote 5 new lockout/tagout procedures for equipment such as air compressor, boilers. I updated lockout/tagout for 10+ that included other equipment and multiple assembly lines. To do so, I collaborated with experienced technicians of that plant and engineers to understand how each equipment/assembly line functioned. Finally, I migrated all lockout/tagout procedures to an online tool called Link360, which allowed all the procedures to be in one place and these procedures could be edited/updated in the tool easily. 

• I conducted pressure survey on compressed air pipelines all over the plant. All air compressors were on one end of the plant, so by the time compressed air reached assembly lines on the opposite end there was a significant drop in the pressure. I learned about P&ID drawings and compared the existing P&ID drawing for the compressed air pipes to physical pipes present for documentation. I checked for assembly lines that saw a decrease in pressure and followed those lines to check for any obvious problems in the pipes. If there was no obvious sign for a drop, I calculated the optimal pipe sizing based on the required flow rate for each skid. I documented multiple improvements that could be made to fix the pressure drop problem.

• One of my other project was the most interesting one. The idea was to recapture water heat. Steam is used to sanitize large vessels that hold liquid makeup. Once the steam condensates it is sent to drain. This condensate is also very hot. Letting the hot condensate go to drain was a huge loss of energy. The plan was to use a heat exchanger to exchange heat between the hot condensate and water that goes into the boiler. If the water that goes into the boiler is already at a high temperature, it means that the boiler has to provide less energy to convert it to steam. That would mean thousands of dollars in energy savings. Even though the idea was noble, this project met a quick dead end when we calculated the flow rate of condensate going into the drain. Even though the condensate was high temperature, the flow rate was low so we could not justify using a heat exchanger. Still I was able to learn a lot about heat exchanger from this project. 

• Being a mechanical engineering student, I obviously wanted to do some design work but work assigned to me had nothing to do with design. So I took the initiative to find work where I could utilize my skills in SolidWorks and 3D printing. I found out that the plant had a single computer with old SolidWorks license and a Stratasys Mojo 3D printer. 

  I identified 3 problems in the plant that could utilize for 3D printed parts:

1. Washroom equipment printed stand

• The washroom equipment is a bulky aluminum piston looking piece that is carried in a cart. the contact between the equipment and cart, usually caused damage to the washroom equipment. I decided to make a 3D printed stand for the washroom equipment such that the 3D printed part could sit on the cart and the equipment would rest on top of the printed part. 

2. Labels support

• Each assembly line had at least one round label that was rotated to put on the final cosmetics bottle. These labels tend to bulge up while rotating and getting entangled which would force technicians to stop the assembly line to fix it. This accounted for huge time loss which correlates directly with money loss. I 3D printed a modular support that could be placed on top of any size label which would prevent it from bulging.

3. End gripper fitment check

• The assembly lines had multiple serial and parallel robots that did palleting or pick and place jobs. Most of them did pick and place job and each robot had a specific type of gripping finger attached at the end effector. These gripping fingers, even though made of aluminum, sometimes would get bent. Even a minor change in those gripping fingers could cause the bottles to not get picked and placed in the correct spot. This led to technicians stopping the assembly line and visually checking the fingers which was both time consuming and inaccurate. I took careful measurements of multiple of those fingers and 3D printed slots where the fingers could be fit checked. This made the technicians life easier because parts could be checked for any bends on them accurately. This helped to reduce interruptions in assembly lines by a significant amount.