Lead Process Engineer for the $140 million wet mill portion of a 110 million gallon per year ethanol plant expansion. The project included new corn receiving, steeping, milling, evaporation and drying equipment. Responsible for coordinating design with the client and developing P&IDs, hydraulic and thermal calculations, equipment specifications, and equipment layouts. Prepared and evaluated equipment and construction bid packages and led on-site piping tie-in design team.
| Unit operations: Corn cleaning, Corn steeping, Multiple-effect falling film evaporation with thermal vapor recompression, Disk milling, Hydrocyclone separation, Disc stack separation (centrifugation), Germ washing, Fiber washing, Starch washing (cyclonettes), Dewatering (screw presses), Rotary vacuum drum filtration, Ring drying, Rotary steam tube drying, Bulk truck unloading, Pneumatic conveying, Conveying (bucket, belt, drag & screw), Regenerative thermal oxidation, Energy recovery (heat exchangers and scrubbers), Sulfur dioxide scrubbing |
| Products: Corn starch, Corn germ, Corn gluten (protein), Corn fiber, Corn steep liquor |
| Company: Cargill, Incorporated |
| Location: Blair, Nebraska |
| Total installed cost: $140 million |
This was a detailed engineering design project that I worked on as a contract engineer for AMG, Inc. out of their Omaha, Nebraska office. The project included an additional corn storage tank, a new steephouse, an expanded millhouse, a new steep liquor evaporator and additional animal feed drying capacity. The project was designed using 3-D modeling software, but this was not yet linked to an underlying database so I maintained a separate database with the equipment, line, and valve lists (not recommended).
Being located in the AMG Omaha office, not far from Blair, I was at the plant site and in the plant multiple times a week walking down piping and working out details of the design. I also met regularly with the Cargill project team to review drawings and specifications and resolve outstanding design issues. All of this information was then transmitted back to the AMG Dayton, Ohio office where the bulk of the design work occurred.
Construction began in 2006 and in 2007 I was hired by Middough to work on the preliminary design for the next Cargill Blair expansion.