Week Three Rudy

Hello WashU + any and all readers, my name is Rudy Lawler.
I am an incoming Junior in Mechanical Engineering - I was at summer school during the start of the program which is why this post is just about my first week. After getting in Sunday dead tired, we quickly got into the swing of our projects. I spent the first two days taking tours of the brewery, having conversations/quizzes with some of the leads, and reading a manual on all of the equipment used in the Brewery's packaging lines. After that, my lead Terrence and I ran a "loss and waste analysis" on the packaging hall and found a good source of water loss for me to investigate: a tunnel pasteurizer that is currently using 10 times the water projected by the manufacturer. For the last 3 days of this workweek I read up on Pasteurizer technology, found the pathways by which water is lost/consumed by the pasteurizer, and gone over some theories that Terrence has for why the machine discharges more water than it should. I began to look into one: that the cooling tower wasn't pulling its weight in terms of the change in temperature of water that it returned to the cold water tank - it was confirmed but a solution isn't known. Next week I will continue to check into that issue and several others and hopefully begin to test solutions!

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