Chemical Cleaning Shop saves water and money after improvement event Published June 3, 2011 By Brandice J. O'Brien Tinker Public Affairs TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- The team had one goal -- brainstorm ways to save energy and reduce costs. When the chemical clean rapid improvement event wrapped, they had a handful of viable long and short term countermeasures. Earlier this year, a group of 72nd Air Base Wing Civil Engineer Directorate and 76th Propulsion Maintenance Group subject-matter experts discussed the chemical clean process, where aircraft and engine parts process through a series of chemical tanks for cleaning and paint removal. At one time, the shop had been known to use 160 million gallons of water in a year. Despite the reduction, the shop still uses approximately 25 percent of base water. "This RIE was a no-brainer," said Britton Young, Tinker's Energy Team point-of-contact. "You get the right people together and something great was going to come out of it. Expectations were met." Van Nguyen, 72nd ABW/CE environmental engineer and RIE team member who offered a pollution prevention and energy conservation perspective, agreed. "The RIE is an effort to be open-minded to different possibilities and think out-of-the box, requiring collaborations of different perspectives because not only does the solution have to help reduce energy/water usage, it has to improve production and be user-friendly," she said. Prior to the RIE, the chemical clean shop had made some significant energy-saving modifications. One change saved Tinker 2.2-million gallons of potable water; but the RIE team wanted to do more. Knowing the shop is scheduled to undergo a major renovation starting in fiscal 2012, the group said they wanted to brainstorm practical short-term solutions that could be added to today's process and long-term options that can be integrated in the overhaul. "The team didn't want to invest a lot of money, resources to implement a solution that may be completely removed when the renovation takes place," said Ms. Nguyen. In addition to reducing water use, the group also concerned themselves with the amount of steam use, compressed air and blower air. They wanted to meet base-wide reduction targets of .3 percent for electricity, 2.75 percent for heating, 1 percent for cooling and 19 percent for fresh water. In studying the issues, the group determined much of the challenge lied in the way processes were carried out. "We looked at it from four perspectives - method, man, machine and materials; we really dove into it," Ms. Young said. "We found the process was designed for continuous operation and either there were no controls to turn utilities off, or the controls weren't designed to be turned off and then on daily." They also discovered many processes hadn't changed since the machine was introduced and several processes relied on a manual operator. "In this instance, we are saving water resources by understanding the configuration of equipment," said Paul Garnaas, 72nd ABW/CE Resource Efficiency manager and RIE team member who was the technical advisor on the process and energy efficiency. "Folks can make a huge difference by turning the equipment off when it is not in use. This can be applied everywhere. We need to be good stewards of our scarce resources." The team brainstormed seven short-term and 15 long-term countermeasures. If implemented, the ideas could save millions of gallons of water, kilowatt hours, thousands of pounds of steam and tons of cooling energy, and therefore dollars. Richard Renfro, 76th PMXG process engineer who also served on the RIE team, said the solution that could give the biggest bang for the buck is finding an alternate use for the reverse osmosis concentrate. Currently, the hard water goes down the drain to the sewer, but if they implement a change and send it elsewhere, it could save Tinker roughly 13 million gallons of water a year. Ms. Young said they're considering sending that water to other processes, which would save the base more than 12 million gallons of water and upwards of $10,000 a year in water alone. "That's a short-term goal that can be done and won't be tied up in the renovation process," Mr. Renfro said. "It can be done in the next three to six months." Even if the team's solutions were not viable, Ms. Nguyen said the RIE still would have been worthwhile. "By going through the process of evaluation and analysis, it does change the way we work," she said. "Ultimately the goal of this RIE is to change the culture of doing our business smarter."