Our student this week is Sharon Horsewood, a chemical engineering major who accepted a co-op at Keurig Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Knoxville, Tennessee. She describes the department she worked in and what her main responsibilities were.
“I work in the process engineering group at the Knoxville, Tennessee, facility of Keurig Green Mountain,” said Horsewood. “Our department’s responsibilities include overseeing the green bean delivery/cleaning/transport, roasting, grinding, flavoring, and degassing of coffee prior to K-cup packaging.”
The job has given her the opportunity to gain invaluable experience.
Said Horsewood, “This includes: a solo project to evaluate, offer ideas, and implement a solution for monitoring compressed air in the plant, to compile and evaluate the last six-months of green bean deliveries and offer suggestions as to how this can be altered to create better flow and consistent work, perform various tests (related to degassing) on possible changes in packaging to allow for faster packaging of our product, and attend various building expansion meetings.”
The most valuable benefit for Horsewood has been the ability to put her studies in to practice.
“Completion of CBE 490 last Spring was the perfect setup for this job,” she said. “A portion of our project involved calculating required energy used on a compressor and calculating the manufacturing cost. Only after I began researching my first on the job assignment (compressed air solution) did I realized many of the same calculations and concepts applied (just on a much larger scale). Interacting with the equipment these calculations are being performed on, understanding the impact and limitations as well as their overall impact on the work being done is just the opportunity I needed to solidify the concepts. I will be looking for other opportunities such as this during the rest of my co-op position here this year.”