Ghameswari Shunmugam

Project Involvement:

Project Location:

• Baytown Olefins Plant,Texas
• Singapore Olefins Plant
• Kuala Lumpur Technology Centre

1. Run length extension study for process gas parallel driers for Ethylene plant

-Established a quality prediction and conducted risk assessment for drier desiccant run length that resulted for extension of drier run for 2 years using maximum capacity study.

-Single drier operation data was used to established the preliminary case for the maximum weight % of absorbent for breakthrough and downstream equipment hydrate formation studies

Achievement: Extended 3 desiccants change out cost by 2 years, 900K USD as a total.

2. Multi stream bank heat exchangers foulant management program

-Spearheaded to examine the effectiveness of foulant removal through offsite cleaning method compared to inhouse cleaning method using plant data improvement post offsite cleaning.

-Proposed for continuous fouling inhibitor injection by increasing the restriction orifices (RO) size and continue with in house cleaning method for significant heat recovery through a improvised foulant management program for the 2 bank heat exchangers around Quench tower.

Achievement: Total win of 120KUSD/year due to significantly lower in-house exchanger cleaning cost.

3. Feasibility study for C2 Splitter tower flooding for high production capacity

-Performed estimation of column flood points or maximum operating capacities using Pro II for production creep of 15%.

-Pressure drop correlation predicts both capacity of the system and flood point that matches the plant flood test conducted during start of run. Temperature and composition profiles were considered to showcase the accuracy of the study.

Achievement: Increased by 0.5Mlb/day of production which brings profit of 100K USD/month

Base Work:

• Responsible for remote monitoring of high frequency, long-term process monitoring and troubleshooting activities for an Olefins Plant in Baytown USA.
• Accountable for furnace, quench system, distillation towers, reactors, steam compressors and turbine, caustic treatment section, chill trains, driers, and refrigeration and condensate system
• Generate mass balance, heat balance for all the relevant operational unit to optimize the operation and for production creep.
• Perform risk assessment and economic evaluation to assist site in planning for the Annual Maintenance Plan (AMP)
• Leads coordination between platform monitoring team and engineers to generate quarterly business driving performance metrics and benchmarking studies for Dryer & Absorber and Chill Train/Cold Box technology across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific Olefins Network.
• Coached junior engineers to be well verse of Olefins technology and equip them with knowledge for site operation troubleshooting.

Project: Pacific Science(PacBio) Sequal Lens – Etch Improvement

Strategized and implemented the complete process development projects to improve etch profile with the optimum etch rates for power and photonics technology by understanding failure modes and defects

Base work:

Responsible in designing and optimizing vapor and plasma etch processes for semiconductor devices, integrated circuits and life science to ensure robust etch processes that meet the precise physical and electrical requirements as per customer.

Projects:

1. New texturing technology from (powder additive to liquid additives) for mass production

Location: Panasonic Energy Osaka, Japan

Led the team for technology transfer from Japan in new texturing process method and achieved mass production implementation with Pmax +0.30% using Design of Experiment approach.

2. Development of total etching reduction for Wet Etch Process

Location: Panasonic Energy Malaysia

Spearheaded and implemented a new development of etching reduction and achieved output power improvement of 0.11% and cost down worth MYR333K/yr by using Continuous Improvement Method

Base work:

• In charge of Wet process & Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) of solar cell fabrication and responsible to ensure the performance of the line product align with engineering target control.
• Lead capital equipment acquisition projects using continuous process improvement (CPI) and new technology introduction (NTI) efforts to maximize product yield, reduce cycle time, and lower product cost

Project:

Successfully conducted a detailed study and used the Six Sigma DMAIC method in choosing AISI 316L stainless steel, material of higher fatigue strength that causes pitting corrosion or chloride stress cracking by root cause analysis (RCA) implementation