2018-03-29 12.01 Charter Steel Pre-InPLT Training Webinar on Fan SystemsPage 1 of 20
Male, Female
Male: Hi, good morning as well as good afternoon depending upon your location in the US. Welcome to Better Plants webinar. This is actually a preparation webinar for upcoming in-plant training, fan system in-plant training at Charter Steel Saukville, Wisconsin plant. This is Sachin Nimbalkar, Technical Account Manager for Better Plants Program and we have our expert, fan system expert, Warren Martin today with us. He's going to deliver a roughly 1-hour webinar and we also have Tari Emerson from Charter Steel. So what we'll do is we'll start with roughly 5-minute opening remarks from Tari Emerson and then we'll go for actual webinar from Warren Martin.
Just a couple of things for all participants, in the beginning of this webinar all participants, we are going to keep you in mute condition. Basically all your phones are muted just to keep background noise minimum but during the webinar if you have any questions or if you have any comments please actually use – there is actually a questions tool on the right-hand side in the GoToWebinar toolbox. There is actually a questions box as well as a chat box so you can actually write your question or send us a chat message. We'll address your questions as well as comments.
There is 1 more option. There is actually a digital hand. You can actually wave your digital hand using the GoToWebinar tool and then we'll un-mute you and then we'll ask you then – then ask you a question to the expert, Warren Martin. And then at the end of the webinar we'll un-mute all of you. With that I'm going to request Tari Emerson from Charter Steel, she is Corporate Energy Manager there, maybe introduce herself and then give us opening remarks, a little bit of background on Charter Steel's participation in Better Plants Program. Tari? Tari, are you there? I think – maybe I think what we should do then in that case I think Tari is probably on mute; her phone is probably muted. Tari, can you hear us?
Female: Hi Sachin. Can you hear me now?
Male: Yes, yes, yes, we hear you well. Yes, go ahead Tari. Well technical difficulties and I had actually reserved a room but then called in from my office so…
Male: Okay, no problem. Okay, great.
Female:I just wanted to welcome everybody to the pre-training class on our fan seminar. Hopefully everybody is excited to attend. This would be Charter Steel's third DOE-sponsored or facilitated event. We had a treasure hunt that we conducted in Cleveland, we had a process heating event that we had in _____, and now we're looking at the fan class with _____.
Charter Steel joined the Better Plants Program in the fall of 2015 and set a goal of 25-percent reduction in 10 years so our baseline is 2016 so our goal plan is to make that in 2026. You know we're looking forward to the fan training and looking for potential savings. We feel it's important to conduct an event every year to get fresh ideas to help us meet those reduction goals. I did want to welcome any guests that are not Charter – from Charter Steel. Certainly we've found that the guests have a unique viewpoint and are able to provide a fresh review so welcome to our guests.
We will be providing a safety video when you arrive here and personal protective equipment but we do request that you wear – if you have any steel-toed boots, if not for sure closed-toed shoes and long pants and if you have any specific eye protection bring that along; otherwise we will be able to provide that. In addition to the guests we're certainly excited to have a cross-functional team of people from Charter Steel being able to participate in this _____ so that we get a variety of views and opinions and hopefully that will give us the best results as far as finding savings. So with that I can turn it back over to Sachin.
Male: Great, great. Thank you so much Tari. We have roughly 27 participants today and I'm glad actually we are kind of starting with Tari I think your introductory remarks are very important and background also are very helpful. Again we are going to keep all participants in mute because we want to keep background noise low. I think with that without wasting further time I'm going to request Warren to actually start with slide number 1. Warren, are you there?
Male: I'm here. Can you hear me okay?
Male: Yes, yes, we hear you very well. Yes, thank you Warren. Go ahead.
Male: Well thank you very much Sachin. It's a pleasure to be participant in the webinar today and I can tell you that I'm very much looking forward to the event at Charter Steel. I had the pleasure of visiting the plant this past week and I'll tell you it was great to meet everybody there, a great group, great facility, and wonderful training room. I got a chance to take a walk through the plant and take a look at some of the fans that we're going to see what we can do about incorporating into the course so I'm very excited about the event.
So for this webinar that we have over the next hour I've got a few slides up front that I want to present talking in some very I guess you'd say an overview perspective of Better Plants and the program and then we're going to talk a little bit about our company and what we hope to provide to the attendees of the fan systems training at Charter Steel and then what also at the back part of this, and this is actually going to be more of the focus of the 1-hour talk here is going to be an overview of fans and fan systems and how one approaches this sort of equipment in order to try to optimize the energy use of it. So that's sort of roughly where – a bit of a thumbnail sketch of where I plan to go over the course of the next hour.
Okay, so let me see – there we go. The in-plant model, 5 major objectives, what this is and Tari enunciated this point about the goal, which is the 25-percent reduction in 10-year period, objectives for this beyond this beyond that are identifying the energy-saving opportunities and I mean it all has to start with identification, doesn't it? If you don't have that as something identified then you can't very well proceed further.
Some of the way you proceed involves networking, there's vendors that you have that you've got to work with in order to realize this, there's the project implementation, and when you take on any kind of a project there's a process that you have to follow right from the study to the writing of specifications, selecting the particular vendors, getting the thing commissioned properly, put into service, and then verifying that it all works properly, and then part of that process too is to leverage this and to make sure that you can do it over again whether or not that's in the same plant or in other plants that you may have. And then of course taking that forward into the real-world training to get a little freedom and other opportunities in other areas or training with the equipment that you've optimized to make sure that everybody is aware of what is required to keep it in an efficient running state.
What is in-plant? Several things that in-plant involves but focusing strictly on the training, typically this is going to be a multi-day event at a host plant, in this case Charter Steel. It's going to involve both classroom and fieldwork sessions; at least – I haven't visited anybody else's so I'm assuming that they also get in the field and I'm sure they do. I've seen some of the pictures at least of other events and you know that's quite important to get some real-world experience. I'll tell you, of all the different trainings I've participated in I think this is 1 of the greatest ones just simply because you get this mix of classroom and dirt under the fingernails experience in the field to actually either bring those examples into the training or to use those in order to figure out what you can do to optimize the equipment that you're dealing with so it really does work out pretty well.
In-plant spreads the benefit beyond the walls of the host facility and that's certainly the case whether or not you're dealing with other plants or whether you're dealing with your suppliers or somebody in that complete chain. And so all of this is designed to just keep the focus and a culture in place of treating energy efficiency as something that you can control and very important to do that from the perspective of the profitability of the company and achieving all of those goals of in this case here 25-percent reduction over 10 years.
Here are some pictures of a few other trainings. I've got to tell you, I love the DOE for selecting this photo because I think somehow we got featured in 3 of 6 photos that are in there. We got a couple of us from flow care doing fan testing at a previous in-plant on the top left corner there and then on the top right you can see the fan model and I'll talk a little bit about the fan model that we're going to bring to Charter Steel for the training. Then the middle picture at the bottom there that's actually 1 of the fans that we tested at _____ Middle as part of the in-plant training. That's a combustion air fan for a re-heat for us and found some pretty – yeah, some excellent savings on that fan as a result of the work that we did at the in-plant training.
Male: Yes, yes, that's correct Warren and I think intentionally we added those photographs because you are actually there in an action and then a couple of other photographs in the middle we have compressed air in-plant training at Navistar plant. I think Jack _____ is also attending to this webinar and then Jack ______is actually corporate energy manager for Navistar and heating the middle picture there, compressed air in-plant training.
Bottom left we have our leader, Tom _____ from R&L using a pure gas analyzers collecting pure gas data at an aluminum manufacturing plant and on the right-hand side we have an ______Center and actually in ______they actually conducted a 2-day – basically a 2-day cross-cutting assessment along with compressed air in-plant training as a Navistar plant so we can do that also so cross-cutting that means they look at all systems. So there are different types of in-plant trainings available. Well today of course I want to focus on fan systems but just FYI the different types of in-plant trainings available, and in fact there was an email from DOE yesterday asking for applications, in-plant training applications from Better Plants companies to submit so that we actually go for the next round of in-plant training. Go ahead Warren, sorry.
Male: No, that was great input and I'm focused on fans and obviously that's not the only game in town. There's a lot of other important things and other good trainings that are available as part of this. For those who are considering in-plant training it is a process that you go through in order to get this set up and it takes several months. At least if you don't have several months it does get way too rushed and you like to at least have some organizing up ahead there to work through a lot of the logistics of exactly what you all want to be focused on and include and how you're going to do it.
And but it doesn't end either with the training. We go through the preparations, the pre-training, which is this webinar, the field training, which will happen in a few weeks at Charter Steel, and then there's follow-up with this where the correspondence between the host and participating plants and I want to make it clear that at any point anybody is welcomed to give me a call to follow up anything that comes up later on. A lot of times things come up later and they're kind of like, "Yeah, you know what? I think he talked about that." Well feel free to shoot me off an email or call me up and we can work through something.
Qualification for fan workshop attendees, I was telling Sachin that this is 1 slide that I changed a little bit. There was a few different bullets on the original slide here that had to do with trying to define specific people who would be the best to take the in-plant training and there was nothing wrong with that list. It involved talking about energy managers and people involved with production and controls people and so forth, definitely all the right people here.
But when I think about the people who have benefited most from the training that we've done quite often they're people that you just simply would not expect. It doesn't have to be necessarily people with – in manager's positions, more education, or that sort of thing because the point that I want to make with this is that with fans in particular it's the simple things that get done that can really, really send your energy bills through the stratosphere.
I'll give you an example with this. A few years ago we were doing some work on a power plant and there were 2 units at this power plant and each unit had 4 large fans. And each 1 of these fans had a low speed and a high speed and at 1 point they used to be able to make full boiler load on low speed. And then all of a sudden they found out that they couldn't make boiler load speed anymore on 1 unit, just 1 of the units, and so they had to go to high speed. Well the different between low and high speed meant that 4 fans were taking 2000 horsepower more, so a total of 8000 horsepower more in order to make boiler load.
And after running this way for a while and not getting to the bottom of it somehow they became aware of us and our company and asked me to come down to look at it and I kept telling them, I said, "You know I really do believe we've got to get inside the fan here to see what's going on with this and what changes did you all make on this," and so forth and I guess I was at a conference someplace and I got a call at 10:00 at night saying, "We've had an unexpected outage. Can you get up here?" and by pulling a few tricks I managed to get up to site and they had the doors open. I poked my head inside and what I found was that they had installed a wash system to wash the particles, wash the debris that built up on the fan impeller and the way the plumbing was set up on 1 fan the plumbers had kind of tucked up the piping right next to the wall of the fan on the inside and it didn't get into the path of the airflow whereas on the other one they had built a little tray that stuck out about 6 inches and the air had to come down and it hit this tray and as it would kind of swirl around the tray it would get into the eye of the impeller, but it did so in such a way that it ruined the performance of the fan and so they had to switch all these fans now to high speed.
So a bit of a long anecdote there to say it's the simple things. I mean in this case it was a plumber who just didn't know better who ended up creating a situation where the power went up by 8000 horsepower on these fans. You know tuck that plumbing up against the wall and you won't have a problem. So I mean here's the kinds of things that I look for as far as qualifications because you have people in the plant that are operating fans but they really don't know what causes what and in particular what the relationship is between what's going on with the fans and what's going on with the production. And in a steel plant, which is where we're going to of course, you have these different operating modes of charge and tap and blow and it's very important to know exactly what should that fan be doing for each one of these modes.
The second thing, and this is sort of the issue that becomes something I deal with so often is maintenance issues on fans, I understand that in our company we're dealing with a lot of different problems, not just excess energy. And I had this theory that if somebody is telling me they've got a fan that's a chronic nightmare as far as maintenance goes it's also oozing energy. And you don't have to look too far with examples in your day-to-day life to know how that happens. I mean if you've got a sputtering car, you know what, it also isn't going to be energy efficient. If you've got underinflated tires it isn't going to be very energy efficient.
I often use that as a test to see whether or not there's going to be energy in addition to what kind of problems that are the immediate things that need solving. Are you designing a new process for which fans are going to be selected? We're going to talk about selecting new fans to some extent during the fan in-plant training and it's so important to get it right the first time because if you don't get it right the first time it seems like you're struggling with this thing that you spent a lot of money on and it just isn't quite what you need for the application.
Are you process-limited, poor control, you can't make certain products because of not being able to get the flow down to where you should have it? One of the other areas of course especially in a steel plant you're dealing with fume capture and it's so important because it's usually the fume capture fans that are all your largest fans. And then the final point is that we want to be competitive with where the plant should be and the energy costs are 1 of those controllable costs or somewhat controllable costs that you'd like to get reduced as low as possible. So those are the qualifications that I put for the attendees with that notion that sometimes it's the very simplest things that can throw your energy costs way sky high.
Sachin, I don't know. Rewards for participation? I know 1 thing: I'll probably bring some prizes along, but I don't think that's what the DOE intended on this slide so Sachin if you want to jump in on that one you're welcomed to do so.