DOE/Industrial Technologies Program DOE Award Number DE-FG36-05GO15099 Plant Wide Energy Efficiency Assessment Pilgrims Pride Corporation – Mt Pleasant Facility

The U. S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Industrial Technologies Program (ITP), through Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is supporting plant wide energy efficiency assessments that will lead to substantial improvements in industrial efficiency, waste reduction, productivity, and global competitiveness in industries identified in ITP’s Industries of the Future. The stated goal of the assessments is to develop a comprehensive strategy at manufacturing locations that will significantly increase plant productivity, profitability, and energy efficiency, and reduce environmental emissions. ITP awarded a contract to Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation to conduct a plant wide energy efficiency assessment for their Mt Pleasant Facility in Mt Pleasant, Texas. Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation is the largest poultry company in the U.S. and Mexico producing nearly 9 billion pounds of poultry per year. Pilgrim's Pride products are sold to foodservice, retail and frozen entrée customers. Pilgrim's Pride owns and operates 37 chicken processing plants (34 in the U.S. and three in Mexico), 12 prepared foods plants and one turkey processing plant. Thirty-five feed mills and 49 hatcheries support these plants. Pilgrim's Pride is ranked number 382 on 2006's FORTUNE 500 list and net sales were $7.4 billion. In Mt. Pleasant, Texas, Pilgrim's Pride operates one of the largest prepared foods plants in the United States, with the capability of producing 2,000 different products and the capacity to turn out more than 7 million pounds of finished goods per week. The facility is divided into distinct departments: East Kill, West Kill, Prepared Foods, Protein Conversion, Wastewater Treatment, and Truck Shop. Facility processes include killing, eviscerating, refrigeration, baking, frying, and protein conversion. Pilgrim’s Pride formed a team to complete the plant wide energy efficiency assessment. The scope of work for this project was to: provide the analysis of departmental energy use, identify areas for detailed analysis, perform a detailed analysis for several of the opportunities identified, and support the development of an energy strategy for the facility. The team consisted of Pace Global Energy Services, LLC; Hudson Technologies Company; Rocky Research, Inc.; and W.J. Turpish and Associates. The project used a systematic approach to complete a plant-wide energy efficiency assessment at the Mt Pleasant Facility. Major energy consuming equipment and processes were determined and opportunities for high annual savings potential were targeted for further evaluation. Exhibit 1 below summarizes the major savings opportunities at the site. The total energy savings represent 14% of the energy consumed on site on an MMBtu basis, with 12% of total energy savings achievable in projects with less than a two year payback. Pace Global Energy Services, LLC of Fairfax, Virginia provided the analysis of departmental energy use, identification of areas for detailed analysis, and support for the development of an energy strategy for the facility. Hudson Technologies Company analyzed the combustion and steam systems to identify opportunities for economic heat recovery and improvement in boiler operations. Rocky Research, Inc analyzed the refrigeration systems and W.J. Turpish and Associates reviewed the cooling towers and evaporative condensers

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Estimation of Sparse Memory Taps for RF Power Amplifier Behavioral Models

When a larger than required dimension such as memory depth or order of nonlinearity, is specified during behavioral model extraction, redundant terms can be calculated when determining the weights of the model. Extraction of a behavioral model can therefore benefit from a priori knowledge of the system to be modeled. Conversely if there is a limitation in the hardware required to calculate model outputs a limit can be set for the maximum number of weights to be used. In this letter, an approach is proposed which allows the input delay vector to be reduced to a sparse vector including the delayed samples which are most important in the construction of the power amplifier model. Simulations of behavioral models for experimentally measured data of two different PAs demonstrates the sparse models extracted in this way are as accurate as a full model but have a more compact and as a result more computationally efficient structure