Stephen Wells
CEO
NPC Connected Solutions
Stephen Wells is the co-founder of NPC Connected Solutions, a technology company in State College, PA that enables manufacturing professionals to harvest intelligence from legacy systems and use that knowledge to drive efficiency, safety and sustainability of their operations. Stephen received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering with a focus on Applied Acoustics from the Pennsylvania State University. Before founding NPC, Stephen worked as a senior scientist on NASA’s Artemis program and at the Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory.
Are Your Heat Exchangers Stealing Your Cooling and/or Heating Capacity?
Heat exchangers, specifically Plate Heat Exchangers (PHEs), use significant heating and cooling capacity during operation and can be a blind spot for many manufacturers. Over time, internal fouling of PHEs decrease the heat transfer capabilities and effectively “steal” the heating or cooling capacity from other manufacturing processes. A fusion of wireless vibration and temperature sensors were used to measure the efficiency of multiple critical PHEs in real-time without having to modify the existing structure. As fouling forces an increase in energy consumption to maintain the desired temperature output, preventative maintenance procedures such as “Tactical CIPs” were used to clean the PHE volume at data-driven intervals to bring the efficiency levels back to nominal operation. Measurement techniques and resulting data will be shared to provide tangible examples on how these preventative procedures effect energy consumption. Approaches will be discussed to help enable manufacturers implement similar energy saving preventative maintenance procedures.Process Heating & Cooling Show Speakers
Process Heating & Cooling Show Agenda