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BSME – 21 yr. work experience
Position: Contract/Mechanincal/Construction/Power Plant Engineer
Introduction: I'm looking for a stable employer who is growing, improving, and questioning the status quo. I'll work hard to shorten the learning curve and make things happen.
The work at Project Associates has been declining for months. I've been holding on through lay-offs and reduced working hours. I miss owning the problems and finding the solutions. I'm ready to help the team get the job done in an industrial environment again.
Sr. Mechanical Engineer - Project Associates, Inc (PAI) - 2 yrs (consulting engineers)
Projects at Alcoa, Alcan, Indianapolis Power & Light, RiverView Coal, Warrick Power Plant.
Project management, design, costs, manage designers, ACAD, whatever is needed for the job
* Coal conveyors, truss enclosure, mechanical components, drive, take-up, etc.
* Warrick - Ingot furnaces, design of tilting holder, flux rack, and move of 1 million lb assembled furnace to final location (outage critical path)
* Warrick - Cooling towers, estimates, design, rental towers, outage plan, process load study
* Misc. - pallet clamp, feedwater piping, drum filter replacement, platforms, rotary furnace, etc.
Sr. Mechanical Engineer - Alcoa, Warrick Operations - 5 yrs (large, union plant)
Finishing Area project manager & mechanical engineer for capital projects.
* CPL6 "Hotcool" Boxes - eliminated 90% of the oven drips on the sheet
* CPL6 oven process manager
* CPL5 Scrap trim system - increased capacity and stopped scrap jams
* Misc. projects - VOC removal system for coating storage, pack/ship stretch wrappers, Litho line placement, conveyor automation, coating oven studies/energy savings/venting upgrade, FISC system study, slitter baller safety, core handling and packaging, coil handling, etc.
Sr. Mechanical Engineer - Alcoa, Lebanon Works- 1.5 yrs (small, union plant)
Project manager & mechanical engineer for capital projects including a $6 million "super" slitter installation, plant boilers, machine guarding, fall protection, trim systems, coil handling, weekend maintenance supervisor, etc.
Plant Engineer & Maint. Supervisor - Henry Molded Products - 3.5 yrs (non-union plant)
Handled all engineering and maintenance issues in the plant including production flow, machine layouts, utilities, warehousing, material handling, etc.
* Designed and installed a major production line addition which included stock preparation systems, electrical substation, pulp molding machine, tunnel dryer, process systems, etc.
* Supervised the maintenance of the plant including a 4-6 person maintenance crew
Project Manager & Design Engineer - Merrill Air Engineers - 9 yrs (turnkey systems)
Provided turnkey industrial ventilation and oven/dryer projects for the paper industry and molded pulp industry. Responsible for all aspects of the projects including concept designs, proposals, cost estimates, PO's & invoices, detailed design, ACAD drafting, installation supervision & start-up.
Education – Summa cum laude, UMaine, Orono, Maine, 1984-1988, BSME
Summers and weekends – roofing jobs, carpenter, built in-ground pools, night auditor
Jim Bernier, BSME – 21 yr. work experience
Past Experiences
I will work, study, question, ask, compile, summarize, calculate, etc. until I have my arms around the task at hand. In a simple, honest way I will help the team discover our current reality and keep our focus. I am straightforward and determined.
I've always said, "If we don't service out customers efficiently, our competition will". I like continuing to improve, getting better, aiming for perfection. I've never hit it, but we must aim for it.
I've functioned as a design engineer, Autocad designer, drafting checker, cost estimator, sales engineer, process engineer, installation supervisor, start-up/field engineer, plant/facilities engineer, plant maintenance supervisor, weekend maintenance supervisor, data analyst, project engineer, project manager, and design coordinator. I will do whatever needs to be done.
I've worked with a wide variety of systems and equipment through the last 2 decades. Typically they were custom, industrial systems for 24 hr/day operations. Here are some of them: air make-up/ventilation systems (steam, hot water, glycol, gas, electric, thermal oil), dust collection systems (RDF, sawdust, fly ash), ceiling sweep systems, mill ventilation systems, humidity and odor control systems, scrap conveying systems, dryer hoods, material handling systems, high-humidity tunnel dryers, HVAC, process chillers, molding machines, pulping process, prototypes, small scale tests, level control, electrical substation, combustion systems, slitting lines, coating lines, incinerators, solvent ovens, water-based coating ovens, time studies, aluminum furnaces, cooling towers and chemical treatment, belt conveyors, ergonomic systems, machine guarding systems, core cutting systems, compressed air, water systems, compost VOC removal, etc.
Some of the equipment includes: burners, fans, ductwork, dampers, louvers, actuators, electric heaters, coils, heat exchangers, chillers, condensers, conveyors (chain, mesh, overhung), instrumentation, level probes, pressure switches and transmitters, thermocouples, RTD's, PLC's, servo drives, HMI's, vacuum pumps, molds, motion control, drives (motors, reducers, etc.), pumps, piping, tubing, platforms, foundations, insulation, refractory, cranes, manipulators, stretch wrappers, boilers, scrap choppers, scrap ballers, cyclones, air slides, baghouses and collectors, scrubbers, drum filters, hydraulic equipment, pneumatic equipment, etc.
We must know the process before proposing solutions. Each process is different. I really learned this when a consultant tried to implement a pulp mixing process at Henry Molded and it didn't work. He said it had worked at several paper mills. He said he was only a "concept" engineer, and he was not responsible for the details. I had to rework his system. I simplified things and downsized for our batch process. We made the scheme work after some pain.
At PAI I recently completed the mechanical design for 2 coal belt conveyors. Before that I was project manager for a cooling tower at Alcoa. Before that it was the mechanical design for Warrick's 6-wide furnace project included furnace layouts, flux rack design, and handling the details for the furnace move. Alcoa had never moved a 1 million pound furnace before. My role changed as teams formed based on the needs of the projects. This added variety to the job.
Jim Bernier, BSME – 21 yr. work experience
Alcoa taught me a lot about safety, machine guarding, patience, process management, ergonomic issues, and respect for those who get product out the door. Alcoa continues to implement a system of lean manufacturing based on the Toyota system. I practiced continuous improvement utilizing tools such as kaizen, visual factory, 5S, autonomation, SMED, etc. I learned the dangers of excess inventory, WIP, and long delivery times. Lean manufacturing is common sense applied to production. If we don't produce more with less, our competition will.
The "Hotcool" Boxes were my most satisfying accomplishment at the Warrick plant. We fixed the 20 yr. old problem of wax drips in the oven. When we added a vision system to the line, we saw all of the drips. As our customers added vision systems, they saw drips too. A quality jump was needed. I implemented a trial heating system to melt the waxy build-up. It worked well and bought us time until a permanent change could be made. The OEM had no answers. But I came up with one. It took 1 trial, 3 prototypes, 3 years, and persistence. It worked. The payback was excellent.
At Warrick I proposed capital upgrades in pack/ship. The plan was RFID tags on each coil and an automated packing line. Labor savings would fund each phase. Phase 1 was implemented successfully. Management did not want to pursue the other phases. They will continue to spend a lot of overtime to operate pack/ship without more modern equipment.
At Warrick the Litho team could not find a spot for the new Litho line in Finishing. It is a monster line. I convinced them that I could make pack/ship work despite the warehouse needs. I joined the team for 2 months and laid out the entire finishing area to accommodate Litho. Management adopted the plan despite some short-term trucker pain.
At Merrill the experience at a small company with only 1-3 engineers was valuable for me. We did work anywhere we could get it and visited several industries. Pulp and paper plants and molded pulp plants were the key customers. But I also got exposure to trash-to-energy plants, furniture plants, Formica plants, boxboard plants, tissue plants, etc. We had to quickly assess the problem and propose a feasible solution. I learned to be fast and imaginative.
At Merrill we had success with our high humidity dryers for molded pulp products. We even built a cotton dryer in Franklin, OH and an indirect-fired dryer in Lurgan, Ireland. We rebuild 2 out of 6 zones in a PCA dryer in Griffith, IN and increased production while reducing energy use.
I enjoyed each part of Merrill's projects. It was rewarding to develop the concept, estimate the cost, design the system, supervise the fabrication and installation, and start it up.
I've worked around conveyors, condensers, LP feedwater heaters, condensate pumps, boilers, ash hoppers, FGD systems, etc. at these plants. Those experiences rounded out my previous work around boilers and air handling systems in plants. I've worked with just about every system that you would find in a power plant. Plus I've worked in union plants. Plus I've managed maintenance personnel. The one area I would need to brush up on is the boiler internals such as tubes, metal choices, chemistry, etc. But I can handle any project that needs to get done in the power plant.
JB, 2009
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