How are you keeping heat transfer relevent to management in your jobs? 3

[thermdes]

I would like to get some suggestions from those of you that are in charge of a heat transfer group or perhaps you are a lone wolf...

in my situation, I am a lone wolf. Prior to this, I performed alot of project work with bits and pieces of thermal work. Now due to the uptick of thermal answers, I am doing this exclusively. I have some ideas, but I am looking for ways to make sure I stay relevant. What are some of the things you have done to prevent being a victim of the axman?

 

[Inthevalley]

The answer is that you need to show your work to be worth real money. If you can't do that, then probably you should not be doing it in the first place. (The typical management answer...) What I have found over the past 10 years, being both on the engineering and management side of the table is the following:
1. Test and monitor
The problem with this is that often thermal issues are masked by poor operations or maintenance - whatever you improve on the thermal side gets lost by maintenance and operating who now has to work less due to having more margin available. The only thing I found to work to avoid this was to do proper acceptance tests of whatever was done, and then monitor it to death until it becomes the new norm.
2. Big ticket items
One also need to ensure that you tackle the big ticket items first. For instance, on a power station >50% of the heat gets lost through the cooling towers. Looking at most stations this is the bit that falls apart - you figure that. If you can have even a small benefit here it makes all the difference.
3. The best form of marketing is training. What I found that by teaching others about the subject, they connected the dots themselves, and suddenly we were really in demand. Design a course called something like "technical experience". Note that there should be no mathematics in the course - just focus on concepts!
4. Paint simple pictures
Most managers are too busy to dig through pages and pages of thermal figures. If your results for an entire plant is more than one page nobody reads it. If it shows robot charts with lots of green, 3 or 4 yellows and 1 or 2 reds then magically the most serious issues get resolved. The trick is to keep adjusting the targets over time so that there is always 1 or 2 red robots requiring attention. Don't frighten management off the first time round by saying everything is bad - have a 5 year plan where you want to get to.
5. Never give up

 

[thermdes]

Thanks alot inthevalley. What do you think about this:

1. Thermal newsletter- illustrating the goals for this function and ways to help product development

2. Interview middle and upper management on the goals they would like to see met from a thermal standpoint.\

3. I like your training idea. Maybe I could set up a short intranet class on thermal analysis and its benefits

4. Write papers (internal and external) on useful problems solved.

What do you think??

 

[Inthevalley]

1. Thermal newsletter- illustrating the goals for this function and ways to help product development
Just keep it fun, and be wary of going too technical. Most engineers don't understand entropy, thus don't go confusing others with it. Lots on pictures, few words...
If there is already a site newsletter, I found this worked better because a) the person putting together the paper always battle to find good articles, and generally jump at the chance to get one or 2 technical articles as well and b) the circulation is a lot wider than a technical paper and more importantly c) you don't need to do the marketing of the paper - and thus can focus on more important thermal issues.

2. Interview middle and upper management on the goals they would like to see met from a thermal standpoint.
Mostly, you will find that management do not know what they would like to achieve from a thermal standpoint. What I found worked better was to go with a proposal on what you think shoould be achieved, and ask for their comments/ support - have the robot chart I talked about in your back pocket. Just make sure there are lots of dollar signs on the proposals - even if it is rough assumed figures. Even a statement like "we believe we could have a fuel saving of around $10000 per year" is a lot better than saying "we can increase the efficiency by 0.05%".

3. I like your training idea. Maybe I could set up a short intranet class on thermal analysis and its benefits
Keep at it - there is a lot of good material out there. Just make sure you turn it into something plant specific. Also remember my earlier comment of not having any mathematics in there!

4. Write papers (internal and external) on useful problems solved.
Focus on external papers. I'll probably get stoned for this by most engineers, but the sole purpose of these papers are to make your management look good. After all your intention is to gain support over the long term. Even if management stuffed up 49 out of the 50 thermal areas, focus on the one which was managed well, and write the article about that.

One last trick, which most engineers often overlook:
Use the right unit of measurement. If you e.g. want to say the dissolved oxygen is good, use 2 parts per million. If you want to say its bad, use 2000 parts per billion.

Enjoy!

 

[Onno]

Just a note on the side from somebody with no managment power but always in front of the managment team.

With "in front" I mean, being looked at and judged.

Making prototypes (downscaled) seems to work for convincing managment, students, project team members and for getting financed.

For example.

We made a liquid CO2 cooling prototype out of old fire extinguishers, piping, resistors, an old power supply. But it works. For nearly no cost this set up showed all relevant cooling properties for this system.

It is not so difficult to report to managment with a written study on these small scale experiments done with such a set up because these difficult things were done while they were still easy.

I agree with InTheValley that more than 1 page reports generally do not fall within the intellectual capacities of managment. However it is part of your, my job to convince these people of the relevance of our ideas and proposals for the future of the company.

So.

Show how it works. Show that it works. Show the components. Do a 5 minute presentation of a down scaled experiment. Publish a 1 or 2 page report. You'll be relevant for the future and you'll be remembered.

Succes, Onno