Facility has shot at award

Springdale firm nominated again

For the third year in a row, a Northwest Arkansas aeronautics facility is being considered for a top state honor for environmental stewardship.

Pratt & Whitney PSD, an aeronautics repair facility in Springdale, is being recognized for several innovations that the facility has incorporated into its daily operations, reducing its energy consumption by about 11 percent in 2013.

The facility is one of six finalists for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality’s Envy Award for environmental stewardship. This is the third year in a row the company has been a finalist.

Mike Finan, general manager of the facility, described it as an “engine overhaul shop,” re-machining worn or damaged engine casings through use of equipment including heat-treatment ovens and electron beam welders to refashion aircraft components.

The sheer amount of energy required for such repairs is huge. Brad Rekus, environmental health and safety manager at the facility, said the shop typically uses more than 6.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity each year.

“We do have some large processes that use a significant amount of energy that’s unique to our business,” Rekus said.

The 114,000-square-foot facility employs more than 130 workers who work in two shifts, Finan said. Pratt & Whitney acquired the facility from aircraft manufacturer Nordam in 1996.

PSD was Nordam’s initialization for “propulsion systems division,” and although that doesn’t accurately describe the location’s current purpose,Pratt & Whitney still uses PSD to refer to the facility.

Finan said the shop repairs 250-275 cases each month, generating $50 million to $60 million in sales. Pratt & Whitney, which provides aircraft engines for both commercial and military aircraft, is estimated to reach $8.8 billion in sales in 2014, based on existing contracts. The company’s parent corporation, the United Technologies Corp., reported $62.6 billion in 2013 sales to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In addition to conventional approaches to reducing energy consumption such as upgrading existing heating and air-conditioning units and replacing older tungsten or fluorescent light bulbs with LED lights, the facility’s “pollutionprevention team” collaborated with several University of Arkansas engineers at the Arkansas Industrial Energy Clearinghouse to partially revamp the facility’s electrical infrastructure.

The heating and weldingapparatus at the PSD facility was designed around the use of a three-phase electrical system, which provides a constant 480 volts of electricity, Rekus said. By re-engineering the system to drop the “third leg” of that system when individual machines are not in use, the plant significantly reduced the energy consumed in the remanufacturing process, Rekus said.

Darin Nutter, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and Chase Harding, a professional engineer, were part of the team at the Arkansas Industrial Energy Clearinghouse that helped redesign the electrical system that powers the facility’s furnaces and welders. Funded through the Arkansas Energy Office and the U.S. Department of Energy, the clearinghouse offers energy efficiency expertise to manufacturers throughout the state, Nuttersaid.

In 2010, clearinghouse staff conducted a “whole facility energy assessment,” identifying the major sources of energy use and loss.

“Our initial recommendation was to shut down the furnace when a product wasn’t being heated,” Nutter said. “But it quickly becomes more complex than that one sentence.”

“You can never shut these things off,” Harding said. “If you shut them off, it can take hours to get back online, if not days.”

Nutter and Harding said the re-engineering of the electrical systems that serve the furnaces and welders allows operators to reduce the equipment’s electrical draw when they’re not in use, while still providing ready power for quick start-up.

Facility managers also replaced the large, 4.25-inchthick graphite plates that carry engine parts into the heat-treatment furnaces with carbon fiber plates that measure only one-quarter of an inch in thickness, greatly reducing the amount of energy used in the process, Rekus said.

According to Pratt & Whitney’s Envy Award nomination package, overall reduction in energy use at the PSD facility has resulted in an estimated reduction of approximately 450 to 650 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

Both the use of carbon fiber plates and the “3-leg to 2-leg” project, both of which were implemented in June 2012, has since been adopted as a “best practice” concept by the United Technologies Corporation.

Robin Pelton, aerospace sector manager for the existing business resource division of the Arkansas Economic Commission, said the aerospace and defense industry is the No. 1 noncommodity export from Arkansas, accounting for approximately 6 percent of employment statewide.

Pelton said there are approximately 180 aerospace-related companies in the state, ranging in size from Dassault Falcon Jet in Little Rock, which employs 1,800 people, to numerous specialty machine shops employing fewer than a dozen people.

According to information from the Arkansas Aerospace Alliance, aerospace is a $1.8 billion industry in Arkansas.

The winner of the 2014 Envy Award will be announced at the Environmental Quality Department’s headquarters building in North Little Rock April 25.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/21/2014

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