ATA to seek more ideas for energy capture and storage Published Oct. 24, 2011 By Patrick Ary AEDC/PA ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. -- For ATA General Manager Steve Pearson, it's a sign that people care about reducing energy usage at AEDC. However, he would like to see more. "There are 36 people that took the time to think about it, and that is a very good thing," Pearson said. "Probably many more did who couldn't come up with something. But we want to keep it flowing. We want to keep people thinking about it." Those 36 people each received a piece of the $2,000 prize ATA offered in a contest to come up with ideas for capturing and storing waste energy. Eighteen of the submitted suggestions provided ideas for capturing waste energy, and four tackled the energy storage problem. The remaining suggestions were focused on energy conservation and alternate energy resources. The prize was divided because while the entries all offered positive suggestions for reducing energy usage, none of the suggestions that tackled the energy recovery and storage topics showed a clear economic return on investment. In an effort to find more of those ideas, the contest will be offered again in the near future, Pearson said. "It didn't turn out to give us all we needed," he said. "It certainly was a good exercise. We got some good ideas, but it didn't solve the problem we were after. So we're going to do it again." Finding an effective way to capture and store waste energy is an issue that is being explored all over the world. Finding a way at AEDC poses a different set of problems, because the level of power consumption spikes during testing in facilities. Two of the biggest sources of the base's waste energy - heated water that's run through cooling towers and heat exhaust from engine testing - occur only during testing periods. "The problem AEDC has is it's not a continuously running process," said Howard Frederick, an ATA electrical engineering specialist and the chair of the energy competition's evaluation committee. "You get a lot of hot water for a day and then you go several days without it. Just getting an economic return ... it takes so much money and so much investment to get the kind of equipment that could extract some of that waste energy that it would have to run full-time to ever have any hope of paying for itself. That's what we're running up against." That doesn't mean a solution isn't out there, Frederick said - it just hasn't been found yet. "We have fine engineers here," he said. "We have some high-tech minds that may have some good ideas for doing these things." ATA process engineer Austin Voorhes is one of those minds. He submitted several ideas for the energy competition, ranging from storing energy in flywheels to compressing it in air tanks that could power turbines. He said he used his previous work experience in the power industry to come up with his ideas, but he understands funding those ideas is a different ball game. "There's an economic part there that's hard to incorporate for a lot of those big projects," Voorhes said. Pearson believes an economic solution is out there for capturing waste energy at AEDC, even though it may have to be applied differently from facility to facility. He wants to keep it on the minds of base employees. "If we continue to push it, somebody's going to come up with a jewel of an idea," he said. "Most of these folks go home and they're reading technical journals, and there are ideas in there. And if they can keep this little problem in the back of their head as they read these things, somebody's going to hit on the best idea to do it. We just have to get them to continuously think about it - not just for a competition." The reason it's so important goes beyond saving money, because saving money translates into keeping jobs. This year ATA's energy program saved about $1 million, which Pearson said translated into several jobs that may have been eliminated otherwise. He believes there are energy savings on base that would require no investment and total as much as $5 million in savings. "It's a different way in which in which we would do business," he said. "We just have to hunt for it." A start date for the next energy competition has not yet been determined.