Copper Manufacturing Plant

DEAR,

ENERGY CONSERVATION & HARMONICS CONTROL ARE IMPPORTANT ASPECTS.

AS COPPER PLANT MAY BE HAVING FURNACES / ROLLING MILL / WITH LOT OF HEATING - VFD DRIVES - NON LINEAR LOADS.

YOU SHOULD ALSO BE NEEDING TO LEARN ABOUT DG SETS. OPERATION & MAINTENANCE.

You may be in maintenance as HP said (repairing the machines)

You might be in manufacturing area.

You may be in Product testing.

BTW: I am electrical wrking in pure mech field for ages. Joined in Quality Control, thn moved into this mech product and now am more mechanical than electrical. So you never know.

Always remember the knowledge you gained will be useful in all fields - the engineering streams are not divorced.

Generally in this type of process industries , the role of electrical engineer is predominantly operation and maintenance of HT,LT,instrumentation,controls,BMS and all type of electrical controls related to process and other ancillary services .Some time the role needs to involve in the refurbishments of minor works. Also routine check up of all type of electrical, electronics and Electro-mechanical equipment and prepare a consolidated monthly, quarterly, annual reports & Preparation of Plant Replacement Program (PRP) pertaining to electrical, electronic and Electro-mechanical equipment in advance and submit it to policy makers of the organization is also a part of electrical engineer's job. Preparation of technical specifications and drawings for the new works pertaining to electrical, Electro-mechanical and electronics system is also a part of job responsibilities of an Electrical engineer in a process industries.

As a new chemical engineer in a paper mill, my first assignment was to identify the cause of mis-register of different ink color images on a customer's printing press in a different state. I interviewed folks involved to get their opinions where to start, created a small team with different skill sets, traveled to the customer, observed the problem, collected data, and went to work using advice, methods, and tools I had mostly not been exposed to before. It turned out the edge of the paper was not cut straight. It was cut in a wavy pattern that corresponded to the sum of several different periods and amplitudes. I found this was caused by vibration which became larger due to insufficient structural support in the old building, lack of dynamic balancing on the equipment, and a manager assuming that a certain machining task could be completed by a trainee rather than a seasoned mechanic (all union guys are alike, right?). A new structural beam, improved operating SOP's in three different departments, and training made a big difference; complaints disappeared.

I found that there is no such thing as a "pure" chemical engineer, and got a promotion soon after.

You will find the same with electrical engineering, my friend.

Do not underestimate what you know already; you are not so ignorant that you did not ask for help. Do not assume you know too much, but realize you have been taught much, and with the proper attitude can still learn much from those around you and from scientific observation. Most important do not fear to act on your knowledge.

Be a good steward of the skills you have and the resources around you. Have fun!

There are various areas of an EE.

A lot depends on how the company operates the facility.

If it uses supplier provided designers and fixers on the major equipment there will be just fine tuning uses for an EE. Supplier provided copper plants are often "air dropped" in by major engineering companies. These major firms do their research at head office abd use data supplied by the plants around the world to improve the efficiency.

If this is a plant that "grew like Topsy", and researched it's own growth along the way, then there can be great scope for an EE in dealing with process automation and instrumentation. One of the expensive inputs to these plants is the megawatts of power used. Improve the efficiency by 1% and you have earned your wages. Preventive maintenance on all high current connections (say 500,000 amps at a few volts per a cell that is part of a large matrix of seriesed and paralleled cells) to make sure that no strings end up hogging current as other strings reduce current by having a few high resistance junctions. Usually they monitor all these junctions and if one gets a little hot and oxide creeps in, they fix it ASAP. They do avoid lossy junctions with welded connections, but they do need to change plates to add new impure copper plates and remove the new 99.99% copper ones. I have not seen these connections to individual plates, but they need to have close to zero IR drop or they will get red hot fast. I would use IR monitors to read each of these connections all the time or many times per shift.