Date of Graduation

1999

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering

Committee Chair

B. Gopalakrishnan

Committee Member

Ralph Plummer

Committee Member

Caulton Irwin

Abstract

Small and medium-sized manufacturing plants (those with fewer than 500 employees) represent more than 98 percent of the more than 374,000 establishments in the U.S. manufacturing industry, 64 percent of employees in the total manufacturing labor force, and more than 42 percent of total manufacturing energy consumption. In 1976 the federal government started funding industrial energy audits for small and medium sized manufacturing firms under the auspices of the Industrial Assessment Centers (IAC) that are spread throughout the U.S. The data collected from the hundreds of energy audits that are conducted each year is collected in a database maintained by the Office of Industrial Productivity and Energy Assessment (OIPEA) at Rutgers University. This database contains a wealth of information about small and medium scale industries that are spread throughout the U.S. The objective of this research it to utilize the database tools that have been developed expressly for this purpose and analyze the database to elicit useful information from the database and to study any trends that may exist in the data.

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