Circulator Oil Engine Failure

During the summer of 2013, I was employed by the Dow Chemical Company as a Maintenance and Reliability Engineer. I was located in Deer Park, Texas at their acrylates facility. My time there was only for the summer, which meant I was limited to thirteen weeks to complete my projects. The main project that I worked on while employed there was to install a filtration system for the circulator pumps. There are over sixty pumps throughout the site and they were all failing at different times due to filtration issues. In this report, I will discuss what the project entailed, how I went about completing the project, and what technical knowledge I gained from achieving my goals for the assignment.
At the Deer Park site, the main goal was to produce acrylic acid. According to The Dow Chemical Website, “Glacial Acrylic Acid Monomer offers significant advantages as an additive in a wide range of …show more content…
I came up with five ideas that I thought would be adequate to solve the problem. I presented these ideas with my team of engineers, including my direct supervisor. All five of the ideas were shot down! This was kind of an eye-opening experience for me because all the hard work I put in researching these ideas was shot down in an instant. But I learned how each design did have a possible failure that each specialist pointed out in the review. For example the maintenance staff did not want it to be a paper filter on the inside. They did not want to have to clean the paper filters each time. They would like to have a stainless steel basket that could be removed and easily cleaned out and not replaced. Also two or three of the ideas were too expensive for the budget that I was given after-the-fact. So after going back and looking at different ideas, I came up with one filter that was stainless steel, small, had a removable basket, and did not require any downsizing in the pipe that was coming in from the water