Pumps & Systems, January 2008

Click here to read part two and part three.

The stiff competition for global market share is exerting downward pressure on prices at the same time as labor, capital and raw material costs all escalate under increasing environmental regulations. With margin pressure escalating on multiple fronts, the charge to find new avenues that can reduce operating costs and meet regulatory compliance is shifting manufacturing processes from the economics of lean to the systemic philosophy of dematerialization.

What is dematerialization?

In a broad sense, dematerialization means doing more with less: reducing the quantity of materials required to serve the economic functions in society. Dematerialization originally focused on reducing the weight of materials being used in products, but its impact on the environment now expands far beyond that, because less materials used in industrial processes reduces energy usage, green house emissions and the facility footprint.

In other words, dematerialization ultimately helps sustain the human economy over the long term through higher manufacturing efficiency. And in many cases, acceptable net earning increases can only be achieved through these higher manufacturing efficiencies, requiring the reengineering of existing or new processes for quantum leaps in performance.

Rethinking the production process, right-sizing process equipment, installing equipment that is intelligent and integrating its real-time information into production and asset management information systems are of paramount importance. These features of dematerialization are the requirements for the manufacturing processes of tomorrow - and will be part and parcel of sustainable plant design.

One Plant's Status

In 2001, a representative of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) of Snowmass, CO addressed a Sustainability Conference in Dallas, TX. Texas Instruments (TI) executives in attendance requested that RMI hold a seminar at their corporate office on innovative microchip fabrication plant designs, one of several industries where RMI has expertise.

The subsequent meetings at TI headquarters in Dallas fostered awareness of opportunities for sustainability and whole-system design. In Richardson, TX in November 2004, TI broke ground on a state-of-the-art, high-efficiency, million square foot chip fabrication facility, designed in large part with ideas generated from meetings with RMI.

Before they broke ground, Texas Instruments was seriously considering building its new facility overseas to compete on costs. Fabrication facility costs are inordinately high, not only due to the specialized tools that are required but also because of the scale and complexity of the process equipment that delivers large volumes of chilled water, clean air, vacuum, scrubbed exhaust and other utilities.

TI understood that implementing energy conservation measures can improve key operating parameters such as batch setup time, process yield, and production flexibility. In new or modernized plants, energy conversation measures will reduce capital investment and construction time - both critical factors that enhance competitive position.

In building a new plant, TI also had to combat conventional attitudes and standard design problems. Despite significant potential for innovation, manufacturing understandably fosters a risk-averse culture due to exacting process requirements, safety risks, the high cost of downtime, and stiff competition. Meeting production targets and time-to-market goals requires precise monitoring and control over a myriad of process variables. When there is consensus that a particular system design is working, it is duplicated exactly from one facility to the next. From then on the prevailing attitude is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Historically, facility designers and engineers have also been incentivized to oversize process equipment to handle future capacity increases. In effect, they have been hired to design systems that work today, not to design systems that work efficiently and adapt to future change. Standard designs has been seen as a way to save time, reduce capital costs and ensure consistency, yet this same inflexibility dampens the potential for enhancement to the process and often inhibits the implementation of energy efficiency measures.

Other challenges included the extensive heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems with high-performance filters to maintain clean room temperature and humidity, while removing airborne particles. Pumps, chillers, fans and furnaces deliver cooling water and conditioned air into the clean rooms via an extensive network of pipes and ducts. Electricity is the largest single operating expense for chipmakers (outside of labor), totaling millions of dollars annually at a single facility. A modern chip fabrication facility also uses up to 2-3 million gallons of water per day, with about a fourth of it used for cooling.

Their Path to the Future

TI designers were told to cut the building and utilities cost by 30 percent over previous designs or the new facility would be built overseas. Rather than viewing this challenge as insurmountable, the TI design team went back to the drawing board. Old assumptions were analyzed and conventional wisdom was challenged. The goal was to find multiple cost benefits from simplifying the process design; i.e., doing more with less.

Savings quickly started to multiply. Employing variable speed vacuum pumps, cut to idle speed when waiting for wafers, saved 300 tons of chiller capacity and 7 percent of the plant's total electricity. Optimizing process temperature and pressure drops saved a fifth of internally cooled tools' water flow. Internally cooled tools with heat exchangers designed to reduce pressure and temperature losses cascaded into a 3,000-gpm reduction in the size of the central process cooling water system, saving both capital and operating cost. Smarter exhaust systems saved 100,000-cu ft per minute of exhaust.

As new design ideas progressed, it became apparent that smarter tools, which required less supporting infrastructure, would cascade into additional energy and water savings. Other design change ideas included a split chiller system that cools water to two different temperatures for separate purposes; highly efficient fan filter units for air recirculation; prechilling incoming hot air with outgoing cool air; bigger pipes and smaller pumps to cut friction and capital cost; natural daytime lighting and highly efficient lighting fixtures in the office area; solar water heating; a reflective roof; and extensive water recycling and reuse (reclamation will save nearly a million gallons of city water per day).

Recovering heat that was previously wasted, and using high-pressure water spray rather than steam for humidification, reduced six boilers to just one plus a backup - both of which will be off most of the year - cutting gas emissions of nitrogen oxides by 60 percent.

In the end, such bottom-line benefits led TI to adopt most of the design changes. All the energy and water savings derived through design modifications only changed the net capital cost by roughly zero - at most 1 percent extra. Total capital cost per square foot, as required, came in at 30 percent below normal, blowing away industry norms and keeping the new fabrication plant in the United States.

A new fabrication plant that produces the wafers used in semiconductors was built for 30 percent less than an older plant constructed in the early 1990s. It promises to deliver a 20 percent reduction in water use and a 35 percent reduction in energy consumption.

Could the next fabrication facility be designed even better, to save 50 percent or more of its energy? As quantum leaps in savings emerge from the next generations of tool and systems design, they will be more efficient and inexpensive. It's a bold new world and, for the innovative thinker and doer, there is unlimited potential for recreating the future.

Mike Pemberton is manager performance services, reliability and maintenance solutions, for ITT Industrial Process, 400 Vestavia Parkway Suite 120, Birmingham, AL 35216, 205-822-7433, Fax: 205-822-7486, http://www.ittmc.com/. ITT Industrial Process is one of the fluid groups of ITT Corporation.

Green Collar Jobs Could Top 40 Million by 2030

Source: GreenBiz.com

The renewable energy and energy efficiency industries stand to add millions of jobs and pump trillions of dollars in revenues during the next twenty years, according to a new research report.

"Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency: Economic Drivers for the 21st Century," from the American Solar Energy Society, said that as many as one in four workers could work in these fields by 2030.

The industries currently generate about 8.5 million green collar jobs and almost $1 trillion in revenue, the report found. That could increase to 40 million jobs and $4.5 trillion in revenues "with the appropriate public policy, including a renewable portfolio standard, renewable energy incentives, public education and research and development," the report said.

"The green collar job boom is here," says ASES's Neal Lurie. "Renewable energy and energy efficiency are economic powerhouses." The report predicts that solar, wind, ethanol and fuel cells will be future hot areas of growth for the foreseeable future.

Some states, such as California, have already mandated that renewables comprise a larger percentage of their energy portfolios.