At my own site in Greenville, one of my responsibilites is to be in charge of a piece of equipment, called the Pastillator, that takes molten product and turns it into small pellets that are packaged and sold to customers. The Pastillator uses a rotating feed system that deposits the molten product onto a metal conveyor belt that is sprayed underneath with chilled water (so the belt is ice cold). The product crystallizes (solidifies) down the length of the belt (which is about 60 feet long) and then is scraped off into small bags, big bags, or drums. Here's a cartoon to help:
Anyways, the reason I mention all of that is because our company expert on industrial crystallization and pastillation is at the Dusseldorf site. Her name is Babett and she is super nice and super smart. My manager decided it would be beneficial to ship me off to her for a week to learn about this process from the best in the business and MAN, I learned A LOT!
The site in Germany is ginormous! Our little site in Greenville has maybe 100 people. The site in Germany is split between BASF and two other companies and has 30,000 (about 10,000 of those people are BASF employees) people! It was like the size of a university! I took a ton of pictures of the site but, unfortunately, I can't post any here because they are confidential. Everyday of my trip I got to tour at least one of the plants located at the site and I met a ton of intelligent, helpful German people.
One of my favorite people that I met was a guy named Thomas whose English was only so-so, but we got by on hand gestures and guessing games. Thomas had apparently visited my South Carolina site for three months back in 2005 when they were first installing our pastillator and he was telling me how much he loved Greenville. At one point he was telling me that he loved working with the people at the Greenville site but sometimes he had a hard time understanding them when they spoke, because "they just talked so hilly-billy!"I almost died laughing right there in the middle of our tour.
I spent most of my time in Germany visiting various plants and people at the site and soaking up all of the knowledge that Babett had on Pastillation, so I didn't get to travel outside of the city (although, if I ever go back I would love to see Cologne). I did, however, get to see a good bit of Southern Dusseldorf (where I was staying) and downtown Dusseldorf which were both super interesting. I took a boat ride on the River Rhine, saw a palace, and ate some delicious food. Here are a few photos:
I had an absolute blast on the visit and learned a lot about the crystallization process. My time with Babett has made me more effective at my job here in South Carolina. Sometime soon I will post a little bit more about what I do here in Greenville and some thoughts from the first half of my assignment. I'm almost five months into this rotation, which I feel warrants some self reflection, so stay tuned for some thoughts on work!
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