News

Family-owned Business “Contains” Energy Spend

HOMERVILLE, GA – For many years, Lee Container in Homerville, Georgia, has lowered costs by using Lean tools to complete Continuous Improvement projects. However, in 2017, the company began to wonder if they could save money in a different way. Because the plant’s utility bills were often over a million dollars annually, the company’s president, Robert Varnedoe, thought they may be able to cut costs by implementing better energy management practices. To identify and understand their opportunities for improvement, Varnedoe reached out to the Georgia-North Florida Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) to set up a no-cost energy and sustainability assessment.

After an initial questionnaire and interview, a team of students and engineers from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering thoroughly reviewed Lee Container’s utility bills. Then, they visited the plant and utilized equipment such as infrared cameras and probes to collect data and assess the company’s operations and equipment.

A few weeks later, they provided the company with a report including information about the current energy use at each production line and throughout the facility, including warehousing and office areas. The report also included five Assessment Recommendations with estimated costs and payback periods. The recommendations ranged from simple investments in insulation to installation of a solar array, but all estimated a payback period of less than five years.

Since completing an IAC energy assessment with GaMEP, Lee Container has:

  • Implemented 3 out of 5 Assessment Recommendations.
  • Invested approximately $16,000 in equipment upgrades, including conversion to LED lighting and improvements to HVAC systems.
  • Lowered the company’s energy costs by over $27,000 per year, which has already paid back the initial investment.
  • Used the report to help them make decisions about future equipment expenditures and energy management goals.

“The IAC team was great to work with. We got the report back quickly and it helped us assess both why our energy costs were high and how we could improve. We have already implemented many of their recommendations and have seen great results.” – Robert Varnedoe, president

Georgia Tech Gives Ice Cream Manufacturer the ‘Scoop’ on Energy Savings

GT-IAC student James McGregor examines a steam boiler

MARIETTA, GA – This July a team of three engineering students from the Georgia Tech Industrial Assessment Center, led by Assistant Director Sinan Sinharoy and Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP) engineer Jason Clarke, performed an energy assessment for the High Road Craft Ice Cream manufacturing facility in Marietta, Georgia. The team spent a full day at the facility, during which time they interviewed facility personnel about operational and maintenance practices, generated several recommendation ideas, and used state-of-the-art equipment to monitor and measure key data. The team’s final report proposed 7 recommendations with estimated energy savings of 41.3%, and total projected cost savings of almost $70,000 per year.

One unique recommendation promoted to the facility was the installation of a direct-fire water heater to heat clean-in-place water instead of directly injecting steam. This proposal would significantly improve heating efficiency due to the avoidance of steam production, which is an energy intensive process that requires extensive maintenance. Other recommendations included heat recovery of boiler condensate, reduction of the air compressor pressure set point, and installation of roll-up freezer and cooler doors.

One of the facility’s best practices involves management’s desire to monitor and measure key characteristics related to energy and water consumption. Facility personnel are looking into meters to track both steam production and water demand for the clean-in-place process.

GT-IAC Helps Trojan Battery “Spark” Energy Efficiency Efforts

SANDERSVILLE, GA – Recently, a team of four engineering students from the Georgia Tech Industrial Assessment Center, led by Director Dr. Comas Haynes and Assistant Director Sinan Sinharoy, performed an energy assessment for Trojan Battery’s AGM/Deep Cycle Lead Acid Battery manufacturing facility in Sandersville, Georgia. The team conducted a comprehensive walk-through of the 291,000 square foot facility, during which time they interviewed facility personnel about operational and maintenance practices in the facility, generated several recommendation ideas, and deployed data loggers to take measurements. The team’s final report proposed 9 recommendations with estimated electricity and natural gas savings of 10.9% and 6.5%, respectively, and total projected cost savings of almost $300,000 per year.

One unique recommendation promoted to the facility was the reduction of the lead pot temperatures for lead grid-casting. This proposal would not impact the process but would significantly improve energy performance due to reduced electrical heater cycling. Other recommendations included the installation of oven exhaust stack insulation, compressed air leak repairs, and a dust collection control system with variable speed drives.

One of the facility’s best practices involves the recycling of a large amount of water used to thermally manage the battery charging process. This conservation practice minimizes the facility’s annual water consumption and cost.

IWF 2018 and EcoGate Dust Collecting Technology

Welcome to the first student blog post for the Georgia Tech branch of the Industrial Assessment Center(IAC)! Let me first introduce myself; I’m Sarah Panitz, 4th year mechanical engineering student. I like long walks on the beach and lazy Sunday afternoons… now that I’ve piqued your interest with my very cliché response let me actually introduce myself and the rest of the team. The Georgia Tech IAC program from left to right includes Shum, Kelly, Sai, Frank, Sinan, Rachel, Toffee, me, and Mikaela.

As the stereotype of the type of engineering goes I bet you can probably guess what the majority of the IAC students are studying…and you wouldn’t be wrong! Mikaela, Shum, Sai, and Rachel are studying mechanical engineering, otherwise known as my personal favorite engineering discipline. While Frank and Toffee are both Industrial and System Engineering majors (ISyE). Kelly, a recent Tech grad in mechanical engineering and former IAC student, now works for Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2, yes we actually say “E I squared”, yes we are nerds, this is Georgia Tech after all) and helps out with the IAC program. Next there is Sinan, he is the main dude running the program on the EI2 side of things, AKA the Assistant Director. Finally, there is Dr. Comas Haynes, he is not in this picture, but he is the Director for IAC program and he is on the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) side of the program.

As the semesters go by, many students will come and go, as they are studying abroad, co-oping, interning, and graduating. But, for Fall 2018, the above picture represents the core Georgia Tech IAC team.

OK! Now that we’ve gotten all the pleasantries out of the way, it’s time to dive into what goes on during an average week for the IAC program and its members.

On Friday August 24th in the early afternoon, Shum, Frank, Mikaela, and I all met up at the Georgia Tech student center to carpool down to the Georgia World Congress Center to attend the International Woodworking Fair 2018 in order to visit a company called EcoGate and get an in-depth view of their dust collection technology. Why, you might ask, would we want to investigate dust collection and the potential technologies out there? Well, that’s an excellent question and the answer is simple, the IAC program in a nutshell is all about energy efficiency and minimizing waste–we look at manufacturing sites and find all the things that can be changed, updated, or potentially installed to help reduce the energy and water consumption, and/or improve productivity. We do this by giving assessment recommendations (ARs) that break down potential savings as well as the return on investment in years. If that is a bit tricky to understand, essentially we recommend things like changing all of the lights in a facility to LEDs, updating motors, adding motion sensors to low occupancy areas, and repairing compressed air leaks, to name a few ARs to promote both savings in energy consumption and cost.

Now, back to Ecogate and why we all went there in the first place. Dust collection is a very important aspect in many manufacturing sites, you’ve got to have it to remove debris like sawdust in a woodworking plant. Dust collection systems typically use large motors and fans to pull debris from work stations into overhead ducts, which route it to external baghouses or other storage facilities. These motors that run dust collection fans are typically major energy users. They can also produce a lot of noise pollution, and if not designed right can be extremely wasteful. Ecogate’s demo was to point out all the ways to make the system more efficient and simpler. Their system uses individual gates for each work station that automatically close ducts when equipment isn’t being used. This system communicates to the main controller to decrease the dust collector fan speed accordingly. This is done through the use of a variable speed drive (VSD) on the fan motor.

So, Ecogate showed us some really cool technology, in fact we’ve already written an AR on this exact topic! We suggested that through the installation of a VSD and a control system using the same sort of technology that Ecogate demonstrated, our client could not only reduce dust collection air flow by 27%, but also reduce their motor energy consumption by 75%. This is possible due to the fan affinity laws, where power consumption decreases by a cubic function based on flow or speed reduction.

If we just look at numbers, implementation cost alone of this dust collection control/VSD system can be upwards of $50K but with this specific AR we estimated that they their payback period would only be 1.58 years as there were savings in both the natural gas and electrical energy side.

And with that comes the end of the IWF and a Friday afternoon in Atlanta, GA.