Project 1
Coker Feed Furnace Preventative Maintenance Stratgy
Location: CNRL Horizon Oil Sands Plant
This project was executed on the CNRL Horizons Oil Sands Plant during my time as a Reliability Engineering Student. As stated in the title this project was me being tasked by the senior Reliability Engineer to develop a preventative maintenance strategy for the 8 Coker feed furnaces. When I started this project I had no idea how the Coker Feed Furnaces worked so my first challenge was to obtain this information. I did this primarily through company documentation such as process operation manuals but I also spoke to the operators many times to get the full picture of how they operate them and what headaches they have from the equipment. What I found out through working with the operators was that the burners inside the furnaces (Picture for reference). These burners were damaged due to lack of maintenance causing the fuel gas tips to start spurting excess fuel gas into the burner. Out of this came a plan for the operators to monitor burner pattern and send in work orders if the flame was off. Unfortunately I was not able to see the final result of this project as the maintenance and PMs were deemed to expensive to implement until they could be worked into the budget for 2026.
Project 2
Kelly Drive Motor Fan Cover Upgrade
Location: CNRL Horizon Oil Sands Plant
Another Project I completed during my time as a Reliability Engineering Student was an upgrade of the Kelly Drive Motor Fan cover. Essentially the Kelly Drive is an electric motor that turns the Drill stem for cutting of the coke out of the coke drum. The motor fan cover had been falling off during operation leaving the fan open to damage and causing a heavy cast iron object to fall potentially a hundred feet down. I was tasked to look into this. What I found from talking to operations/maintenance staff and looking at previous failures that the bolts being used were inadequate for the service. There were only four 1/4 inch bolts that held the fan cover on, these having no locking mechanisms such as lock washers. The motor was exposed to vibration causing the bolts to undo and eventually completely release or snap. To fix this I suggested that we drill the bolt holes bigger to 5/16 -18 and use blue Loctite and lock washers. This upgrade was done on one motor in service and when I came back as a Millwright helper I helped with conducting a PM on the Kelly Drive and I got to see that my upgrade worked and the covers had not fallen off or loosened.
Project 3
Fin Fan Cooler Upgrade
Location: CNRL Horizon Oil Sands Plant
This project was the first I was assigned during my time as a Reliability Engineering Student. The project consistence of coordination and planning of an already decided upgrade to the Fin Fan coolers installed in Primary Upgrading. The Fin Fan coolers are large heat exchangers that use giant fans to blow air over fin and tube heat exchangers cooling down the process fluid. In this case the process fluid were Coker Blowdown gasses a mix of steam and hydrocarbon gasses. These fans had not had maintenance done since the plant completed first oil in 2008 meaning they were a bit overdue. It had also been found that the blade pitch of the fans were completely out of alignment. Where they were aimed to be around 10 degree angle of attack the blades were actually set a basically random values ranging from 2 - 18 degrees. This was unacceptable so a plan was made to upgrade one branch of the fans and repair the other bank. My scope in this project was the execution side. I was responsibility to inform maintenance staff of the project scope and what was required of them. I was also required to verify what parts were required and getting them to site before the project start. This project went well while there were hiccups throughout the end result was achieved and the upgraded/repaired fans are currently working at a much higher capacity than before the porject.
Project 4
360 Design Project
Location: University of Alberta
This project was my design project for the class MecE 360 in fall 2024. The project scope was to design the shafts and select gears for a transmission in a Mario Kart Kart. The first step of this project was to define our design criteria. To do this we had to do "Track Analysis". This consisted of picking a Mario Kart track and then calculate how fast we wanted to go around the track and how many laps we wanted to complete. This lead us to obtaining our main design variables those being max required output torque, gear ratios needed and the number of cycles the transmission needed to run to account for fatigue. Once these values were obtained we used AGMA standards to calculate our required shaft diameter and gear stress. We then selected our gears from manufacturer sites and calculated our stress on the shafts. Once we iterated with different designs we ended up with a 3 gear transmission with reverse as a fourth with safety factors for each shaft and all gears of around 2 including fatigue. We then prepared a final report and presentation rounding out the project.
