My name is Ian Tiglias and I'm a chemical engineer at Alcoa Pinjarra refinery.
So a chemical engineer at Pinjarra refinery can do one of two things, so they have two
major roles. You're either an area chemical engineer where you help on a day today sort
of a basis to troubleshoot and just ensure that all the set points
in your particular area are being reached.
My first task before starting work is to gather all my safety equipment
and make sure that I'm wearing all the right protective gear.
Work starts with me putting all this on, walking to the front gate, swiping in and then making
my way to my office. In the morning, I'll come in. The first
thing I'll do is just have a look just on this sort of a screen on how the production
has gone in the last 24 hours and how our key performance indicators have gone on a
refinery level. I'll then have a look at other screens on
how we've run in certain areas for precipitation which is the area which I look after,
take certain notes down that I'll raise at the morning meeting when I go down there at 7.45.
One of the roles of the area chem enge is to give day-to-day technical support. So
you've got your control attendants that sit on the board and myself as an area chem enge overlooks that,
so if there are any other problems that Couch has during the day, he'll then feed
back to me and then I'll go try and assist him in troubleshooting it and making sure
that we do get our area, so we're just a small area of the refinery, running at
a 100% maximum capacity. All right. What's going on? How are we looking
this morning? I became a chemical engineer approximately
two-and-a-half years ago. I was in Year 10 at school, was unsure of what I wanted to
do as a career, went to a few career fairs and spoke to my parents and they sort of were
pretty supportive of me and said, Do what you enjoy and do what makes you happy,
so I was pretty good at maths and science, got to the end of Year 12, put preferences
in at university and chose to become a chemical engineer and studied four years at RMIT in
Melbourne. And, at the end of that, I started here in 2012.
So now I'll just check up on the project that I'm just currently running. It's
upgrading the flocculant that we currently use for our trays, so it's a new technology
so you can actually use less of this floc than the old flocculant to give better tray
overflow clarities which, if you improve those tray overflow clarities, you increase production
and that's one of the major roles of the chemical engineer at Alcoa is to continuously
improve and make sure that we grow year by year by year in our tonnage production and
therefore making more profit.
Hi. My name is Eugenia. This is the clarification area
so we are responsible here for two main processes. One is to remove the mud from the
liquor and the other is to remove the oxalate from the liquor. I'm Brazilian so I started
my career back in Brazil seven-and-a-half years ago. My whole family are engineers so
it was a very easy choice but also when I was young I used to like to play with experiments
and fix anything around me and that gave me a bit of a sense of how challenging some things
can be and then learn a little bit more of that and the sciences that are behind that.
I've always been passionate about maths and chemistry and physics. And it's part
of my family but I love it too. An analytical mind for sure is a mandatory
thing; also being able to troubleshoot, have curiosity. You have to be able to dig into
any problem without knowing the solution, have the right decisionmaking and take decisions
with little information, know about safety and help with that.
Eugenia's spot on. You need to have that analytical mind and be able to solve problems.
I also think, to be a very good engineer, you have to be able to communicate with everyone.
So not just communicate with your peers but communicate with the people on the shop floor,
electricians, so when you do have a problem, they come to you and tell you something and
you have to be able to understand the complexity or the full scope of the problem. And then
you need to be able to also, when you go away and solve that problem, you have to
be able to communicate back to them so you have to have that really good working relationship
with, in particular, the operators because in the end, they're the ones that are going
to do what you've asked them to do. As engineers, we're trained to find solutions
for things that are not there. It's very awesome.