The plant engineer retired a few months ago, and the plant manager temporarily promoted you from plant electrical engineer to interim plant manager. She's interviewed several candidates, but she's also been impressed with your work. She says she'll give you the job permanently if you can solve two problems.
The first problem is the plant's electrical bills have been steadily climbing over the years, even though the production equipment hasn't been reconfigured enough to account for that. The second problem is that during a maintenance shop walk-through, she noticed the lubrication drums don't seem to be clearly marked. She wants you to look into that and get back to her with recommendations.
How should you proceed?
A good lubrication program is critical to equipment reliability, but is it out of an electrical person's expertise? Not really. Think about electrical work; you follow methods, you label things, and you work with color-coded conductors.
The trick is to learn the methods that must be incorporated into a lubrication program and how things should be labeled and color-coded. If the gearboxes throughout the plant aren't being properly lubricated, then that would account for much of the energy waste. And simply replacing traditional paraffin-based oils and greases with synthetic will give a huge efficiency boost.
On the electrical side, pay attention to:
- Power factor at the load.
- Voltage imbalance on motor circuits.
- Voltage drop on long circuits.
- Motor vibration.
Take measurements to identify problems, then draft a plan to correct them.
