By Jenny Dawson
Jenny Dawson is a Chemical Engineer who has been with Carestream’s White City site for 13 years. She currently serves as the site’s Technical Director for Contract Manufacturing. Previously, she spent eight years in the pharmaceutical industry in engineering, manufacturing, quality, and marketing roles.
Our White City, Oregon site recently had an all-employee event. The goal of the event was to continue to build a One Carestream, One Plant culture through activities that focused on safety, teamwork, and community. It also allowed employees to gain a better understanding of what others in the factory do outside their immediate work groups or work shifts. I organized the event with the help of many people, but my main co-leads in organizing the event were Lance Grace, Blaine Whispell, Ron Becker, Dathen Walker, and Travis Pollard. The event was facilitated by our plant leadership team (i.e. managers) and extended leadership team (i.e, supervisors), plus the EHS team. We also had two guests: Andy Mathews, SVP, Operations, and Bob Lovelace, Polyester Manufacturing Business Manager, Colorado Polyester Operations.
Bike and skateboard station:
We worked with the organization Together We Rise and built 50 skateboards and 50 bikes, which we donated to Our Foster Kids, Inc. a local organization that distributed the bikes to local foster children. Each team wrote a Job Hazard Analysis before starting work on their bikes and skateboards to ensure we were safely doing non-standard work. Once the bikes and skateboards were built, the teams did a safety scavenger hunt to review main safety issues at the site (e.g., where fire extinguishers are located, where AEDs are located, how hazardous materials must be labeled correctly, etc.).
Safety Olympics Station:
Safety Training Station:
All employees went through general hazardous materials training and presentations from the safety subcommittees. Employees who work with solvents had more in-depth hazardous materials training and additional PPE training. Employees who work in our finishing departments had a presentation with a local physical therapist who reviewed ways we can keep our bodies healthy and specific stretches that employees can do.
It was an outstanding event with a lot of positive feedback from employees and we are very grateful to the White City site, Andy, and Bob for their participation and the generosity with their time!
By Lee Runyon
Lee Runyon is a specialist in developing new ways to simulate chemical and physical behavior of materials, and the processes that generate new products. His approach blends several disciplines, including chemical engineering, material science and computer science. In his current role at Carestream,, Lee works on the development of engineering software and computational methods for improving engineering analysis as well as product analysis processes and reducing the engineering resources required to perform analyses. The following is the abstract of a talk Lee gave at the most recent AIMCAL R2R Conference. Applications of Turbulence Modeling for Impinging Jet Flows Applied to Drying and Coating Process Modeling.
In the field of coating and drying research and development, the capability of analyzing process defects, or developing new process windows the field of coating and drying research is largely fueled by numerical-, analytical-, and empirical-driven modeling. This field is primarily consumed with laminar flows at steady state. As is logical only steady state flow translates to a consistent uniform coating process. This includes both steady state coating and drying, and the coated material moves through the morphological transition from liquid to solid.
However, in diagnosing defects, and predicting other non-laminar or steady state flows, different numerical methods must be applied. The focus of this research and development initiative was to identify methods for modeling turbulence when simulating an impinging jet flow. The primary case of interest was for both substrate manufacturing for film, and high intensity air impingement. The final goals were to first identify the key assumptions and equations to perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) on the system. Then to simulate heat transfer for the body being impinged upon.
Key challenges of this research were to develop a numerical simulation that was robust enough to incorporate the pressure, velocity, and temperature equations using the Navier Stokes equations and the energy conservation equation in their tensor forms. The results show the challenges and benefits of developing a numerical simulation for predicting process conditions of non-linear cooling in turbulent flows utilizing impinging jet convection. Through this research, the numerical results were compared to that of the cooling clips on the Biaxial Oriented Polyester Manufacturing (BOPET) process in Colorado. Other key extensions of this research are related to complex air flows in constrained drying applications, along with general impingement drying design simulation.