SAIC’s SmartSite: Greener, Cheaper, Safer — and Smarter

Richard Cronce of SAIC has a seemingly counterintuitive plan for hazardous waste site managers interested in becoming green: Slow down and keep your employees away.

Cronce, who has a Ph.D. in agronomy, is one of the developers of SAIC's SmartSite® — a systems engineering-based hazardous waste management optimization program. It's better management for waste management.

The idea is to take a look at all of the individual components of a waste management system and how they interact with one another, and determine if an alternate technology, management approach, or other program change might improve system performance or reduce costs. Thus, savings found in one area apply to the entire program — sometimes cutting long-term operation and management costs by more than 20 percent.

"SmartSite provides a logical framework for collection and analysis of information for optimization," said Cronce, an environmental scientist in SAIC's Infrastructure, Logistics and Product Solutions Group. "We can apply the approach to a variety of sites."

A New Spin on Traditional Approaches

Cronce has published several papers and given presentations at national conferences on inefficiencies he sees in the traditional approach to remedial site management.

When applying SmartSite to a project, there are typically four areas for green savings. "When it comes to the environment and savings, we try to minimize waste, paperwork, travel and power use," Cronce said. "Power use is far and away where most of the savings come into play."

SmartSite has targeted power savings since its outset, said Senior Process Engineer Jack Templeton.

"Even before energy costs increased, SmartSite performed a comprehensive analysis of power usage," Templeton said. "As many site systems were designed for conditions that may no longer be applicable, the optimization would investigate new or different technologies that would be more efficient for the current conditions, resulting in lower maintenance and energy costs."

In several cases, SmartSite has recommended installing automated controls on monitoring systems designed to keep employees from driving to sites when a problem occurs during non-work hours. Dealing with a failing valve remotely keeps employees out of their cars and greenhouse gases out of the air.

"It's not only a benefit to the customer in terms of labor costs, but to the environment as well," Cronce said.

Those savings come from installing more efficient pumps, taking non-essential systems offline and developing strategies that conserve power.

"For instance, the most power is used when pumps cycle on and off," said Cronce, comparing the cycling of a pump to a car constantly accelerating then braking. "So we minimize the cycles."

Options for pumps include increasing the on-off cycle intervals while running the pumps the same total percentage of the time or using a variable-speed drive that runs slower but longer than a normal pump, eliminating the need for cycling on and off.

In waste management, significant waste can be created by management. Significant expense comes from paper created by a waste management site because of the need for daily readings at various points in the site. Cronce and the team minimize the number of readings taken manually by workers, instead opting for devices that monitor data automatically and send it electronically for analysis.

"Data that is collected by sensors helps eliminate human errors and frees up employees to do other things," Cronce said. "Sending standardized reports electronically can yield significant savings as well as save many reams of paper."

Customers Asking for More Than Cash

SAIC is engaged in an environmental remediation project with a major oil company to provide environmental engineering, management and consulting services to sites both within the U.S. and internationally.

But the client wasn't just concerned with saving money and reducing expenses when it comes to environmental remediation, Cronce said.

"The client was particularly interested in the non-monetary values of SmartSite," he said, "including worker safety."

SAIC has incorporated various tenets to worker safety into the optimization of remediation sites, Cronce said, including minimizing work in elevated positions and time spent by workers in confined spaces, especially areas that could potentially contain harmful gases.

"One example was a site where there was an ozone generator inside of a trailer," Cronce said. "Workers had to monitor the ozone levels throughout the day, and they spent too much time around the generator, which could be harmful."

Enter more automated sensors. "We put a sensor in the trailer and a flashing light outside to let workers know when the levels inside of the trailer got too high," he said. "We also put a sampling port through the wall, so workers could monitor the ozone concentration without going inside."

One SmartSite aim is to put itself out of work. "Our ultimate goal is to get to a point where we can shut down these sites as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible," Cronce said.