Blog Posts

Week 8 – Dashboard Designing

Published:October 31st, 2022
Category:Fall Semester

We are diving nose first into the iterative design process for the development of our efficiency dashboard with one main thing in mind: the customer. This week the team went into the co-generation plant, ate a nice breakfast as a team, and started pulling data to feed the dashboard. Our executive sponsors Steve and Frank helped facilitate this meeting with one of Duke Energy’s data experts, Marion.

Iteration of the dashboard design.

We are excited to say we now have all of our data points that are necessary for the dashboard building. The executive sponsors for the project are our main end user so their opinion on the final product is crucial for the success of design development.

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Week 7 – Preliminary Design Report

Published:October 23rd, 2022
Category:Fall Semester

This week we were quite excited to present our Preliminary Design Report to our liaisons at Duke Energy with a couple of additional guests as well. We received great engagement and discussion that will help propel us into the prototype development phase.

Moving forward, we are brainstorming different iterations of the graphic user interface for our prototype development. This is possible since we have gained a better understanding of the data available to us after visiting the plant last week. We want our design to serve our customer, Duke Energy and the operators, as best as possible. Once a few concepts are developed, we will conduct customer feedback trials in order to achieve this goal.

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Week 6 – Three Site Visits

Published:October 14th, 2022
Category:Fall Semester

This week we visited three sites to get a better understanding of the entire water flow process:

  • Duke Energy Co-generation Plant
  • Rabon Chilled Water Plant
  • UF Wastewater Treatment Plant

On Monday, the team went to the Co-generation plant to sit down with one of their computers to get a better understanding of the kinds of data they collect. This was helpful in narrowing our key indicators for the dashboard development. We also visited the Rabon plant and spoke with Ali from UF Facilities regarding the state of the condensate pipe network. We were also able to tour the UF Wastewater Treatment Plant with one of our liaison engineers, Trevor.

On Tuesday, the team presented our Preliminary Design Report (PDR) to our peers and a few coaches. We received a lot of encouragement and constructive feedback that increased our excitement for the project. With this milestone, we have been able to gather our ideas for the project more concretely and find confidence in our current planned trajectory.

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Week 5 – First Month

Published:October 7th, 2022
Category:Fall Semester
Vectorized our logo for easier readability in a variety of media

Gainesville as a whole was thankfully not impacted too badly by Hurricane Ian. The Duke plant specifically saw minimal repercussions from the storm’s impact. Our coach went to Fort Meyers this week to help with hurricane relief down there.

Our team has obtained access to Duke’s internal documents and data that their team sent to us. In addition to this, we have received printed copies of UF’s condensate line schematics including markers showing problematic areas such as leaks. Our team will be able to use these resources to further our research.

We have planned a trip to tour the wastewater facility with Jared Howard. Mr. Howard is the wastewater treatment superintendent. Our interactions with the UF have increased and propelled us into another aspect of the overall problem.

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Week 4 – Hurricane Ian

Published:September 30th, 2022
Category:Fall Semester

Last week, our team attended a Lean Six Sigma White Belt Training seminar. We learned about streamlining processes, asking “why” to get to the root cause of a problem, and that quality is an important factor among others. We did some team-building exercises with the team Leak IndiGators that showed us how to make the proposed process more “lean”.

This week we collaborated to bring together our first monthly report. This was an accumulation of work that has for the majority already been completed, compiled together in a nice-looking report. Feedback on this document will help us prepare for our PDR. The main point of feedback that we have received is that we need to do a deeper dive into the research of our project for our literature review.

With hurricane Ian hitting Florida this week, we have all been preparing for the effects. The school canceled all classes/events Wednesday-Friday with lots of peers leaving town as early as Monday evening. We all took the necessary precautions and remained as safe as possible.

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Week 3 – Site Tour & Data

Published:September 23rd, 2022
Category:Fall Semester
Our team + liaisons on a tour of the site.

Our team got to visit the plant and meet a couple of our liaisons in person, which helped us gain a better understanding of the overall project scope. This tour catalyzed a lot of research topics for us to dive into these upcoming weeks. Our understanding is that there are a lot of components surrounding the current problem and we are tasked with narrowing in on a concise solution to aid their water process. To further define the scope, we have reached out to two contacts at the University of Florida:

  • Jared Howard: Wastewater Treatment Superintendent
  • Ali Leaphart: UF Facilities-Utilities And Energy Services

We have planned out our project road map and project risk with the help of Trello as an organizational aid. We have begun drafting our first-month report as well as the data collection process.

Our team + coach meeting

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Week 2 – Understand Scope

Published:September 16th, 2022
Category:Fall Semester
Our team logo!

This week we met with our liaisons and coach to introduce the team to each other as well as gain clarity on the scope of the project. We had a lot of our questions answered, set up a weekly meeting time, and began the process of data sharing. We are currently in the process of setting up user accounts to interface with Duke Energy’s system.

We are looking forward to touring the plant and getting a better understanding of the physical process so that we can achieve a further grasp of the problem. There are a lot of moving components in our problem, so narrowing in on a solution is critical.

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Week 1 – Meet the team

Published:September 9th, 2022
Category:Fall Semester

Hello all! We are Julian, Kendall, Grace, and Nicole. Our team consists of two mechanical engineers, one industrial engineer, and one chemical engineer. This week we had lots of ‘firsts’:

  • First team meeting
  • Understanding our scope of work
  • Beginning background research
  • Developing our team’s name and logo

From here we are looking forward to meeting with our liaisons from Duke Energy and furthering our understanding of the problem at hand.

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