Day 90

Morning
There was a project overview meeting today. I went over the small projects first, most of which are 90% done. I set up a plan for each one to be completed with each thing that needs to be finished. The welder project is done except for the Craig Tibbs quote and verification of all the numbers. I was thinking I should write out a few things and organize the "project folder" so it will be well organized when I leave. Jim was working on two/three's power supplies, so I sat in on some of that troubleshooting.

Afternoon
I worked on finishing the E3 documents. I got the spreadsheets finalized and laminated. There is a copy up in the control room for the next change out. I also cleaned up a few things for the week.

Day 89

Morning
We went over across the street to change out the Von Ardenne computer on S10. They had been wanting to try out the spare, so this was the chance. Jim got it out and the spare put in. It didn't have any of the save files on it, so we had to load them off the old system using a floppy disk. The old system is sitting in Dean's office now. I walked down to see Josh Webster. He said everything looked good to him on our network plan. I still really need to talk to Criag Tibbs about the fiber installation.

Afternoon
I went over to the Concept systems Mecop tour. There were a lot of mechanical engineers on the tour, but most of them didn't seem to know a thing about automation controls or panel builds. It was sort of interesting, but they make some fairly elegant (maybe even too much so) solutions to problems. Jessica came over for the Wah Chang tour. My melting section went okay, but I never leave a tour with a fuzzy feeling about the group's learning.

Day 88

Morning
After the maintenance meeting I got to work patching up my cost document. Because I started it before the network meeting with Josh, I needed to update most of the parts and labor items to reflect our new game plan. I got a quote on DST licenses from PCE. I also got some complete numbers for all of the project. I filled in rough numbers with exact quotes, then I marked things that are still a guess. It looks like the upgrade for 4, 6, and 7 will be reasonable for cost, then each additional welder will be about $20k. That works out very well in the long run. We can get the three big welders, then slip in some small money for the older welders.

Afternoon
Ray was having issues with his Von Ardenne computer. Tony tried to find the problem, but no luck. We came back over to this side, and Tony got another call about the computer. This time, he called Josh Webster to take a look at it. He didn't find anything wrong. I polished the cost doc and worked on the stirring coil drawings. I got new prints and marked the nodes that I need power references from Jim. I got them down to him so he can look at them over night.

Day 87

Morning
It was really hot today. I started out by getting together a few things on my cost doc. I added in the new part quotes from NCE to the parts sheet. Rich gave me a call to get a status update on things. Tony and I went across the street to talk S7 before the plant engineering meeting. I sat in on that one, but it was mostly a small review of budgetary items. Tim went into detail about his electrical quotes. The mechanical quotes are less refined, but they are getting there. After the meeting, we talked with Rich about gun physics and Wah Chang things.

Afternoon
I called down to the instrument shop to get a price on the API action packs. I didn't get a number, $350, until the very end of the day. I also emailed out the new fiber plan to Craig Tibbs. The Q2 review was this afternoon down in the visitor's center. I caught a ride with Dean and sat in on that. It sounded like Matt didn't have a great quarter by his own admission.

Day 86

Morning
I got in early so I could leave early. I got to work writing questions that I wanted Josh Webster to answer about our trending network. I also got all the prints that I am going to need for that meeting together. Once I had everything together, I checked it over once more. There were a few issues with the arc furnaces during the maintenance meeting, so Tony went up to work on those. There were a few DeltaV topics to cover which took a few hours. We never could get a solid number for the sample time of an analog input. The meeting with Josh went well. We got some new ideas for the network including the use of switches. I still to get some questions answered, but that will take more time. I also got the quote in from NCE on my parts. They are not going to be too expensive.

Afternoon
Took off to surprise Claire.

Day 85

Morning
Tony wanted to adjust the anode spacer in 4, so I drove down to Fastnel to get some new Allen screws. When I got back, I stopped across the street to put some squid lube on them. That's nasty stuff if you get it on you. I brought them back over here, but Ted Benson was still welding away on his boxes, so Tony waited until later to change out the gun. I went back to work on some drawings for the network layout of the welder upgrade.

Afternoon
I continued to update the drawings, as well as think over the inductor choke issues. I never really know what to do about those, so it wasn't too productive. Tim stopped by to give Tony's IEEE books back and possibly go over the welder again. He didn't stay too long. I wrapped up my drawings and reviewed everything before I left.

Day 84

Morning
I came in and got to work on the cost doc. I added in some sections for parts. It became difficult to fill in what parts I would need for the networking aspect. I don't really know what solution we will find for that, so it is difficult to come up with a price quote. I set up a meeting with Josh Webster for Monday. We will discuss what we want to do, and what is then required for doing that. I am hoping that I can get a much better feel for the parts that I will need to do this so I can get closer to finishing the estimate.

Afternoon
I grabbed a little info off the switch from upstairs before going over to Allvac. I've never been over there, so it was cool to see a completely separate plant. They had a dual press system with an automatic weigh-blend system. They didn't have EB welders, instead they used plasma. They had a ton of furnaces all lined up in a row. It was cool to see the plant because they did a lot of things very similar and some much better. Their shop floor was laid out much better than ours.

Day 83

Morning
Ladd doesn't need the brake system that I designed. They are going to use a 120V coil. I finished up my drawings today. They helped me find a few things that I missed. The D.P. heat relay's weren't on the I/O, so I added them in. Once the drawings for the I/O was all done I wrote up a bill of materials and emailed it to North Coast for a price quote. Tony was having some strange issues on 4 EBW at around 11:00, so I watched the troubleshoot. It might have been a fluke thing, but we never did find the cause.

Afternoon
After helping Chris take a picture of a copper spot, I started to lay out the budget worksheet for the welder project. It has different sections for upgrading welders, putting them on the network, and for getting trending going. The difficult part for me is that I barely know what we need for parts, much less all the labor to install this stuff. I got started with all of the things I think we need, then I started estimating labor costs.

Day 82

Morning
I needed to get the brake drawings done. I finished up the panel drawing, then I made the schematic drawing. Once I had those finalized and printed, we took some of the junk in the office down to Jim's shop. I asked him what he thought. He didn't care too much, but he said that would work. I now needed to get the plans to Ladd. He wasn't in his office so I'll have to try later. I took the truck across the street to leave the box of trigger boards in the storage room.

Afternoon
I started the afternoon by taking a look at the list of Mecop knowledge points. I wanted to get a little better with PID's before I cross that one off, so I read up online about them. It was all stuff I already knew, but it doesn't hurt to see again. I then started to scope out what is left on the welder project. I need to finish the I/O drawings before I can send out a materials list for a quote. I also laid out other things that are yet to be done. When I talked to Tony, he has a lot of numbers that he wants in this budget including a large part of the trending costs. I will have to get all that rounded up, but first I want to get the materials out to North Coast.

Day 81

Morning
I came in and got started working on the new stinger brakes. 9-13 arc all have the same setup with the same brake and electrical controls. That same system needs to get onto 2, 3, 4, and 8. I started by looking at 8 arc because it is the most modern. I found some controls in the Rosemont, but the real work is done in a blue stinger control cabinet down in the shack. There is some relay logic done with Rosemont outputs to control the brakes. It can all be attributed to one relay in the panel. I found a similar deal inside the control cabinets for 2, 3, and 4. They are more primitive, but it will all work. I can adapt the current system to use the single relay from the old systems.

Afternoon
I started work on making a drawing of the new panel layout. I got a little distracted by things like Buck-Boost transformers and circuit breakers, but progress was made. I only needed a few parts to make the entire system work. I want to draw up the layout, then pass it off to Jim. He'll know what size enclosure to get and the best way to build them.

Day 80

Morning
Wit the beam pattern project cooled off, I started to look into the brakes on 2, 3, 4, and 8 arc. Ladd wants them to be updated to have the same braking unit that 9 - 14 have. The problem comes in the controls for those. It's a funky system that needs to get adapted to the old furnaces. I figured out where the brakes are and how they work now because I knew nothing of the stinger drive or any of that system. It looks like I have a bom for the current setup now, but adapting to the old furnaces is going to take a lot more work.

Afternoon
This was equipment overview day after ten minutes of fire watch for some rail welding. It was just Tony and I going over the cooling towers. I learned more about the pumping speeds and some considerations for the water. We went down to cooling tower five and across the street to have a look at them. I also returned the analog input card to Lyon.

Day 79

Morning
I needed to finish up the changes that I made to my beam pattern document so it would be ready for the meeting in the afternoon. Tim moved it up to 1:00 in the tech center. I continued to fill out the sections in the basic beam patterns part. It was difficult to figure out what needed to be written down and what was useless. Tony was working on a new control scheme for EBW4. He was out tuning PID's and watching their output during arc downs.

Afternoon
I got the document done in just enough time to eat my lunch and print off several copies. We walked over to the conference room. The building reminds me of something from campus, but the room itself was nice. They had a decent board table and two dozen nice office chairs. Ken Hansen had a lot of really got insights on the different options for beam control. Tim had done some research on different options, but most of them just fell off. It looks like Ken will be on his own for the S8 upgrade, then we'll use his attempts as a building block / test bed. That was kind of the end of my involvement in beam patterns. I took David back his PLC card and called it a day.

Day 78

Morning
Getting to work on beam pattern design documentation. Rich was in fairly early, so I asked him about what he wanted for the beams. It looks like he needs a low frequency (now this term has been dubbed rate of recurrence) in order to melt the metal in the pool a little, rather than just heat the surface. I set out to make some prints of beams with a set number of points. I started to make them in AutoCad.

Afternoon
I realized that AutoCad was a poor choice because I was already using Excel to generate the data points, so I might as well just use Excel to graph the data. I took some quick shots of a spiral and sine wave pattern for the document. In order to have it ready for the meeting tomorrow, I am splitting it up into two distinct sections: basic beam patterns and advanced beam patterns. The advanced section will be the work that I did last week. Hopefully that will preserve the work I've already done rather than just throwing it away.

Day 77

Morning
With Tony back, there were more things to do. He wanted to get the spacers from the machine shop. I reminded him of the S11 meeting, so we attended that. Afterwords, Tim talked about beam pattern design. I had no idea that Ken Hansen had been looking into that on S8 and they already had ideas of what they wanted to do. I can adapt my work for their needs, but I don't know if the way that they wanted to do it would really work best. I worked on some analysis of the resolution of the beam patterns.

Afternoon
I discussed my findings with Tony. He wants to look at making a really light table of values that can be adapted to become slower as necessary. The maximum frequency of the waves may be something like 8 Hz which is much faster than Rich said he would be needing. I drew up a process block in Visio to show how everything would flow. The trick seems to be communicating what frequencies, periods, and times are being discussed because it can become very unclear quickly.

Day 76

Morning
EBW4 was acting up again. I went out after I heard of two alarms that were holding them out. I went down to the shop to ask Jim about it. He said that he had wired some cable for the new pot, but that it was just landed to a terminal strip. He removed it and the welder worked... for about five minutes. I called Lyon to get some help. Once he cleared them out, the thing ran a production electrode. I worked on cleaning up the mess around the plc. I also finished marking up the beam pattern design document.

Afternoon
EBW4 was sitting, then pumping, so I didn't need to worry about it much. I made the new I/O layout for 2 & 3. I also went through the drawings that I had made up and fixed a few things on them. I also never finished the analog plc drawing, so I fixed that up as well.

Day 75

Morning
This morning was spent working on the beam pattern design. I got to work wiring a pot into the system so that I could see what adjusting on the fly would be like. It worked fairly well once I got a good scheme down for the wiring. The real interesting part was when I found the CH1 vs CH2 plots on the o-scope. I was only partially able to see the actual beam pattern because of the scan rate of the scope. I am hoping that they will look a little better when using the actual beam. I programmed in a few options and watched them go.

Afternoon
I began to document all of the different patterns in my document. I grabbed screenshots of them using the online parametric application. Dean needed help loading 11 so I spent a few minutes helping with that. It was interesting to watch the automated pump down on the furnace. They got down to about eight microns without a jet. It did take a while, but that's not too shabby. I stayed late to work on the document to ensure that it was close to done before weeks end.

Day 74

Morning
Getting to work on S9 beam patterns. I had Dean help me with the work order so I could go down to North Coast and buy an end cap for the Compact Logix here in the office. After getting stung by a bee in the truck, I got my cap and put it on. With minimal fiddling I managed to get the unit working. With some plc programming I was able to make cosine waves and other oscillations on the oscilloscope. I was even able to make the full equation that I wanted. I realized that it would be impossible to make a parametric view of this that would show what the beam pattern will look like.

Afternoon
I worked on the documentation for the beam patterns. I wanted to get a pot on the plc, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. I wrote up all of the math concepts (two waves with tunable frequencies). I haven't hit any problems yet. I also took a :30 minute ethics course online. I don't know where they come up with some of these things, but if they want me to watch it, I guess I will.

Day 73

Morning
When I went out to the welder, the gun had already been pulled and inspected. There was nothing wrong with it. Rich ran it for a little while and came to the conclusion that it needs feedback from the main beam current for sure. The cathode will become too hot from the beam at higher powers and the beam will run away from you. He called Tim down to talk about the changes. We got an operator to weld on those boxes. Tim went over all the controls and discussion with Rich. Then Jim came down to get the wiring changes we will need including a new pot for the spot focus. I talked with him about the welder project, then I continued to work on the work bench Compact Logix.

Afternoon
The work bench wasn't working. After I got the firmware to update, I attempted to put something on the output to read with the oscilloscope. It kept giving me some I/O communication faults. I think they stem from not having and end cap to terminate the internal bus. Regardless, I can't get it working for right now. I asked Lyon, and also went to the stock room. I'll try again in the mean time. I started writing the documentation on the beam patterns because if nothing else I can provide a document to show how to get this stuff to work.

Day 72

Morning
A lot happened today. Jim stopped by the office to ask about the Moore isolators on EBW 4. I didn't know anything about them other than they serve the same purpose as an API unit. Apparently, one of the isolators happened to be wired incorrectly. The Moore unit was fried though (you could smell it). Jim went down to the instrument shop, and returned with an API module. The current shunt still didn't work like it was supposed to when he got it put in. The readout was going from 4-->0 mA instead of 4-->20 mA.

Afternoon
Jim flipped the leads on the API to get the right readout. That produced some good results. With the welder going, he called Rich to take a look at what I call "gun physics." I went back into the office to try to work on some EBW 2/3 documentation. While I was out tracing pressure switches, Rich showed up. We started to run the welder. With a few small adjustments of the focus, he got a beam that could weld. We lost the D.P.'s at one point and then the filament went upon start up. I need to get the gun pulled and repaired for another try tomorrow. I never had time to work on S9 and the beam patterns.

Day 71

Morning
So begins a week on my own. I started the day by laying out what I wanted to get done on the welder project for this week. I need to get cracking on EBW 2 and 3. I did write the SLC 150 theory of operation back in May, but I haven't done the I/O map, desired theory of operation, wiring map, or cad drawings. I got started on the I/O map. That got finished up by lunch time. Their are differences, but mostly just the pressure switches.

Afternoon
Their isn't much going on around here. EBW 4 is loaded with a recycle box, but nobody is running it. I spent some time working on the desired ToOp, but took a break at the end of the day. I searched around for stinger drawings, then went around to a few furnaces (14, 10, 2/3) to try to get a better look at the brakes. I don't know what I am looking for yet, but I will be getting there.

Day 70

Pre-4th of July

Day 69

Morning
Today was the first day without Tony. I started work on the plc setup for S9. Lyons got me a card, but it wasn't what I needed. I wired up Tony's compact logix with the PS-4 power supply and the Sola HD 24VDC supply. Greg stopped in to ask about ebw4. When he was trying to run, the voltage readout was always high. I should have known the problem right away, but it didn't don on me until later. We took a look at the gun before the Mecop lunch.

Afternoon
I went to check on Greg once I got back from a tour of Fab. He said that Jim found a broken "feedback resistor" upstairs. When I found Jim, he had found a busted shunt in the HV cage. High voltage reading means bad shunt. He won't have a replacement until early next week. I went to the stock room and got a 1769-OF2 analog output card. Once everything was wired together I read some documents on how to get setup with the compact logix.

Day 68

Morning
There was a small safety review for the railings that Dean put on 8 ARC. It was a small and informal SI-08. Everyone seemed to like the changes he made. We then went to the meeting with the guys from industrial systems to get the new look for the HPM automation. They put in a new boom that was pretty impressive. When we went out to take a look at the press, it was really making some noise when it pushed the compacts out. Dave said it was only on the 16" die.

Afternoon
I worked on my drawing just a touch more. There always seem to be little things to fix on them. I gave the analog card 24VDC rather than 120VAC. I also updated a few more fine details. Those drawings are hopefully all done now. I also got my midterm appraisal. Tony had no problems with anything that I've done, and he was happy with things like my documents and speed picking up on things. That went really well. Not much got done in the last hour. I worked on some drawings and such while Tim came by to talk about spending on 4EBW.