NEEDED MATH PROJECT
Exergy, LLC Site Visit Exergy has been in business for 43 years and produces a range of heat exchangers from small, compact to very large that are used in the following industries: Pharma/Bio, Chemical, SemiConductor, Alternative Energy, and Food & Beverage. Chris Dufrenoy (Director of Operations) worked closely with Jordan Finkelstein (President) to coordinate our virtual visit. Chris led us on a tour of a variety of work centers; Shipping & Receiving, Finishing, Quality Control, and Assembly. We came away with a solid understanding of the workflow. Following the tour of work
centers, we spoke to five technicians about the work that they do and the math that they use. We found that they use more math than they thought they used, ranging from conversions (e.g., from metric to English units or from decimals to fractions) to reading and understanding graphs and diagrams. Technicians also need to be familiar with a variety of tools for measuring and calculation. We are grateful to Exergy for arranging this site visit, which added to our knowledge of the math technicians need to know on their jobs.
To Manufacturers: Your help is vital in helping us to grow our Needed Math knowledge base. You can help by inviting us to speak virtually with a small group of your company’s technicians and their supervisors via Zoom to find out the math needed for technicians to be successful at their jobs. If you are interested and we hope you are, please contact Dr. Michael Hacker (Michael.Hacker@hofstra.edu)
April 2022
WELCOME TO OUR 2ND ISSUE! We would like to profusely thank Jordan and Chris of Exergy, LLC for providing us with the opportunity to talk with their technicians about the math needed in order for them to be successful at their jobs ! Some comments from our team members following our visit were: • Chris did a fabulous job. You could see the neurons firing in his brain; he was so committed. • This will help us put together some guidelines for other virtual site visits. • We learned a lot.
University of New Mexico MTTC Clean Room The math used is unit conversion such as bars to PSI and liters to gallons, and reading and interpreting graphs and other representations to monitor how equipment is running. In January 2022, we visited virtually with the supervisor and two maintenance technicians at the University of New Mexico MTTC clean room. This facility supports a variety of UMN classes such as: Micro Electronic Processing, Foundations of MEMS design, and Advanced Micro, & Nano Fabrication. The facility also supports university instruction as well as prototype development by small companies. The technicians ensure that the complex equipment like scrubber systems, sputter tools, and bake ovens are
properly maintained. Inasmuch as this entails troubleshooting the equipment when things go wrong, the job requires systems thinking, modeling and problem-solving skills. The math used is unit conversion such as bars to PSIs, liters to gallons as well as reading and interpreting graphs and trends including reading histograms to see how equipment is running. A big shout out to Matt, Mark, & Rich for helping us to understand the math used by the maintenance technicians working in this facility!
AJA Multi-gun Sputter System (MTTC Plaza Photo 2021)
A big shout out to Matt, Mark, & Rich for helping us to understand the math used by the maintenance technicians working in this facility!
Steed six-stack furnace
Project Director Contact Information: Michael Hacker, Ph.D. Michael.Hacker@hofstra.edu 518 915-1411 https://www.neededmath.org/
NSF Project #2100062