AVTEC Industries manufactured engineered food-service systems for schools, hospitals, correctional facilities, and other large institutional kitchens: ventilation, energy and utility distribution, and conveyor-based food-production and tray-assembly equipment.
I did the electrical and controls engineering on custom systems, working alongside the mechanical designers, and the job ran through manufacturing engineering, CAD, product compliance and design automation. Every project was configured to a particular facility, equipment lineup, and operation, then released as project-specific drawings and documentation for manufacturing.
Ventilation and fire suppression
Custom kitchen ventilation systems, in several configurations of exhaust and supply-air hood. Each one had to coordinate the hood, the cooking equipment under it, the electrical controls, the ventilation equipment, and the fire protection.
I designed the Ansul fire-suppression systems, including nozzle placement for the appliances on the line being protected, and wired their operation into the electrical controls so that a suppression event shut down the equipment and ran the ventilation as required.
Energy distribution
Energy distribution systems and raceways run behind a cooking line of fryers, ovens, and ranges and give the whole line one engineered utility structure: electrical power, gas, water, appliance connections, controls, and safety shutdown, in place of a separate building connection for each appliance.
My part was the power-distribution requirements, breaker and appliance circuit allocation, connections to the specified equipment, and the drawings and control circuitry. The electrical configuration followed whatever equipment was specified for each installation.
Controls
Hard-wired control systems from the industrial parts of the period: discrete relays, solid-state timers, switches, contactors, solenoid valves, and interlocks, with no programmable logic controllers. The circuits handled ventilation and wash sequencing, equipment operation, utility control, and safety functions, and coordinated fire-suppression operation with equipment and fuel shutdown.
Tray Trac and conveyor systems
Tray Trac was a circulating tray-assembly system for large institutional food service: carriers moved around the system while staff assembled meals at workstations. One installation could combine heated food wells, refrigerated cold tops and pans, electrical distribution, plumbing, refrigeration, and the conveyor drive and controls.
Design automation
AVTEC drew its project and manufacturing drawings in AutoCAD. I wrote AutoLISP automation for the ventilation hoods and energy-distribution raceways, encoding the product geometry and engineering rules so that a designer could enter a project's specifications and have the system generate much of the drawing, in place of drafting each custom configuration by hand. I also wrote the department's engineering procedure manuals, which standardized the practices the automation depended on.
Manufacturing and compliance
The designs had to be fabricated, assembled, wired, tested, shipped, and installed, so the role carried through to manufacturing, including UL product compliance: keeping custom configurations within what AVTEC's listed products allowed.
Technical scope
Engineering — electrical and controls engineering · power distribution · breaker and circuit allocation · hard-wired control logic · solid-state timers and industrial relays · electrical/mechanical coordination · Ansul fire-suppression integration and nozzle layout · UL compliance
Design and manufacturing — engineer-to-order configuration · project-specific system design · manufacturing drawings · equipment layouts · design standardization · engineering procedures · release to manufacturing
Software and CAD — AutoCAD · AutoLISP · rules-based CAD automation · automated generation of project-specific engineering drawings