Date of Defense

4-16-2019

Date of Graduation

4-2019

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

First Advisor

Decker Hains

Second Advisor

Daniel Irvine

Third Advisor

Brandon Torres

Abstract

A large pharmaceutical company runs a water treatment utility (Qualified Utilities) to produce treated water and steam for their manufacturing processes. Due to the size of the site and many manufacturing processes, the water system is quite large and complex. The system has been mapped out by the company into an extensive flow chart, showing a simplified version of the path each water treatment process takes. The final product produced from this project is a combination of a Microsoft Excel document with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripts written to work in the background, as well as a Microsoft Visio document to create a proper visual representation of the information produced in Excel. The company plans updates and maintains these utilities looking at usage events up to five years into the future. With expected changes, both in routine maintenance and system expansion, the programs written in VBA had to account for flow elements that had not yet been implemented. When the demand in a region of the system increases, it affects all upstream components and requires complex calculations to maintain proper piping, pumps, tanks, filters, and other elements. Each element type was treated independently, and its information processed through equations and relationships to other elements uniquely. This document details background, project scope, design, implementation, and results in the creation of a program to automate these calculations. With the tool created, the company will be able to make any range of alterations to the systems and be shown what greater impact that will have on the Qualified Utilities systems.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Restricted

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