If you think about heavy industry, some clear images come to mind. Massive plants and factories, smokestacks, huge pieces of equipment and operating floors. It goes without saying that the energy consumption and carbon emissions are indeed heavy, too.
Found Energy is looking to change that and reimagine clean energy by harnessing aluminum’s untapped potential to deliver reliable, cost-stable, and clean thermal power for heavy industry. Their innovative aluminum thermal power system delivers superheated steam up to the highest temperatures required by modern industry, all while avoiding the need for electrification, enhancing energy security, and cutting pollutants that occur during the power generation process.
Found Energy’s leap in scale is no small feat. In 2024, they completed their 10-15 kW demo system. The team then began building their first commercial pilot system that can produce 10 times the power, and they’re slated to assemble it this summer. The team itself has tripled in size in just one year, from around 10 to more than 30 employees.
But what do they attribute to this success? It’s the use of AutoCAD that has allowed Found Energy to scale and industrialize rapidly, safely, and accurately.
A bigger team requires better collaboration tools. Previously, only two or three team members would be required to work on a system. Now there are more than 10 members across mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and automation control teams. AutoCAD and the Plant 3D toolset allows all these team members to concurrently work on different subsystems.
A primary use of the Plant 3D toolset is adhering to P&ID standards while building chemical processes, such as reacting aluminum with water. The P&IDs serve as their source of truth, ensuring that every aspect of their projects is built correctly and verified. Additionally, the data manager feature is invaluable for exporting a comprehensive list of every piece of equipment involved in the process.
Collaboration is also key when it comes to adding alarms, flow control mechanisms, and coding PLC designs. The Plant 3D toolset allows team members to export tag lists and generate instrument lists automatically, which significantly reducing manual input and errors. The built-in tool palettes eliminate the need to custom draw industry-standard components, and the automatic tagging features further simplify the workflow. The automatic layer setup in Plant 3D also saves a considerable amount of time.
“With AutoCAD and Plant 3D, what used to take two people a week to get done now only takes a fraction of that time, saving dozens of hours over several weeks,” says Peter Godart, CEO and co-founder, Found Energy. “This efficiency not only boosts productivity but also ensures a higher level of accuracy and consistency across their projects.”
In their previous system, there were only about 20 sensors and actuators. Now, there are more than 200. With AutoCAD, the team can continue to accurately track the design and parts—even as the system gets larger and more complex. For example, from a P&ID diagram, the control team can automatically generate a list of tags (essentially a list of all the parts that are needed), which enables them to easily find the electrical schematics of all parts required. They can then identify the components that they need—rather than manually examining a diagram and counting parts.
“Documentation can be worked on independently but will still interface and connect with other subsystems, eliminating the need to manually update diagrams and documentation that otherwise would very quickly become out of date,” Godart says. “This allows us to iterate very quickly and accurately.”
The team also uses the Electrical toolset in AutoCAD to enhance their efficiency and accuracy in developing electrical schematics. By migrating their P90s and other electrical schematics into AutoCAD, they leverage the extensive pre-existing libraries available in the Electrical toolset. This approach significantly reduces the time and effort required compared to manually creating these schematics from scratch. The toolset’s robust features allow Found Energy to streamline their workflow even further, ensuring precise and reliable electrical designs that support their innovative energy solution.
Moving ahead—and staying on the same page
For Found Energy, the pursuit of industrialization means ensuring engineers are all speaking the same language—not only internally but with industry standards. They used documentation produced in AutoCAD to conduct a HAZOPs study of their system, which is a safety and operability analysis that ensures their system meets the highest industry standards of operability in preparation for installation.
“It’s important for us to communicate with customer engineering teams easily, communicate with vendors, and easily evaluate our system to meet the highest industrial standards,” Angie Ackroyd, Vice President of Engineering, Found Energy.
As the team gets closer to building the first commercial pilot, procurement has been critical. Since the new version is now much larger than the original 15kw system, accurate and timely coordination of procurement of parts is essential.
“AutoCAD makes it really easy to track every single component, from tracking whether we have identified a manufacturer for each part down to whether the part has been ordered,” Ackroyd says. “AutoCAD is helping us make sure we are doing this as accurately and efficiently as possible.”
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