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| November 2009
Welcome to The CTMA Connector, a monthly newsletter designed to provide news and ideas about the Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA) program. The CTMA program is a joint Department of Defense/National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (DoD/NCMS) effort promoting collaborative technology development between industry and the DoD maintenance and repair facilities. This newsletter highlights ongoing projects, serves as a forum for promoting new project ideas, and provides other news of interest to the program. Our goal is to stimulate your participation and solicit your input. Feel free to submit items for the newsletter as well as any suggestions to make it more useful. More information about the program can be found at http://ctma.ncms.org/. To subscribe or unsubscribe to the CTMA Connector, send a message to listserv@listserv.ncms.org with “subscribe CTMANewsletter” or “unsubscribe CTMANewsletter” in the message body. NCMS Booth at DoD Maintenance Symposium Wins Award At the recent DoD Maintenance Symposium, the NCMS/CTMA booth was voted best large booth by the Symposium participants. Following a nautical theme, the booth showcased the CTMA program as well as four CTMA projects including Kinetic Spray Processing, Automated Process and Inspection Guide, Fast Field Fluid Analysis, and Electronic Performance Support Systems. Thanks to Debbie Lilu for coordinating the booth effort. Recently Completed CTMA Projects: Test Program Set (TPS) Migration System DoD Participants: Warner Robins Air Logistics Center; Fleet Readiness Center East; Tobyhanna Army Depot) The Test Program Set (TPS) Migration System project was undertaken to provide lower migration costs, for depot Automated Test Systems (ATSs) and their support lifecycles, when equipment modernization is required. The United States Air Force (USAF) repair depot at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center (WR-ALC) is charged with maintenance and repair of a wide variety of weapon systems. ATSs are employed to facilitate diagnosis and repair of failed and suspect weapon system components. The depot is in a period of modernization due to a high number of its ATS equipment sets rapidly nearing the end of their usefulness. These ATSs are being upgraded with modern supportable commercially equivalent test platforms that are developed to take the Air Force repair capability forward for another extensive period. Hardware replacement costs for the ATSs are estimated to be in the area of $20M, holding aside associated non-recurring engineering (NRE). Along with the ATS hardware there is a wide variety of existing test applications that run on the legacy equipment. There is a huge NRE investment in these applications rivaling the hardware costs by orders of magnitude. In order to maintain the investment in these applications, they must be ported and reintegrated to operate on the new equipment whenever possible to avoid cost burdens stemming from test application rewrites. Some test applications are highly test platform specific and are tightly bound to the ATS that they are meant to operate. Other test applications were written with technologies that help facilitate their migration to platforms that also support the employed technology. The focus of this TPS Migration System effort was to employ commercial technologies to minimize costs by maintaining the NRE already invested in the legacy test applications. Initially the project evaluated emerging technologies for migrating test applications when ATS are modernized or upgraded. This capability analysis led to a more pragmatic focus on existing commercially available environments that held promise in resolving the cost issues with porting legacy applications to the new generation systems. An existing off-the-shelf test application development environment was selected for its capability to be deployed on various personal computer controlled systems. The development tool selected, called PAWS, is an Abbreviated Test Language for All Systems (ATLAS) test application development and runtime system. ATLAS is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard for test application development. The predominant quantities of test applications requiring migration to modern systems at the WR-ALC depot are currently written in the ATLAS language. TPS Migration System demonstrated the ability to employ the commercially available PAWS technology, allowing test applications written in ATLAS to be retargeted on the modern platforms with minimized rework. In conjunction with the test environment integration that was necessary and the test applications rehost that were performed, the TPS Migration System technical team also developed comprehensive test application rehost training for the WR-ALC development staff. The resulting three-day training course provided explicit and detailed information for application developers performing rehosts. All major pitfalls and difficulties that might occur were presented, analyzed, and resolved with extensive presentation and textual material (Appendix A) allowing the developers to anticipate and diffuse potential rehost barriers. Potential BenefitsThe technical team integrated the PAWS environment on a target platform supplied by the WR-ALC depot. The WR-ALC personnel identified three representative test applications that they currently were running on a legacy Army Integrated Family of Test Equipment (IFTE). After the PAWS integration was accomplished to sufficient level to accommodate the selected applications, two of the applications were ported to a simulated runtime and one application was fully integrated. The fully integrated test application was demonstrated by the technical team to diagnose faults to the same level of determination as the legacy system had performed. WR-ALC personnel viewing the demonstration indicated that the test programs had the same look and feel as the legacy system even though a completely different computer type and test platform system were being employed. Moderate cost saving estimates for utilizing the system over application rewrite scenarios predict $78,000 cost avoidance per test application using the rehost environment. In Phase II, the TPS Migration System technical team went on to provide the software and integration to allow PAWS to be used on a new generation of test platforms being developed at the WR-ALC depot called Versatile Depot Avionic Test System (VDATS). The VDATS integration work allows migration users to employ PAWS without having to focus on development system integration details while dealing with actual application migration. With an estimated tens of thousands of test applications requiring rehost to the new target environments the potential Department of Defense (DoD) savings is on the order of $1B. Other DoD depots and repair sites needing to transition to newer test platforms and wanting to stay with the ATLAS language have exactly the same issues facing them for their weapons systems. Use of the migration capabilities at those sites will produce similar cost avoidance. The NCMS Contact is Lee Patch, leep@ncms.org, 734-995-4972. Rapid Manufacturing & Repair (RM&R) Technologies DoD Participants: TRF Kings Bay; NUWC Keyport; NFPC Philadelphia; NAVAIR China Lake; Portsmouth Naval Shipyard; Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard; FRC East; Anniston Army Depot; Tobyhanna Army Depot; Oklahoma City ALC Rapid Manufacturing, also known as additive manufacturing (AM), is a transformational manufacturing paradigm expected to supplant traditional machining and tooling processes for the fabrication of select products. This revolutionary technology builds net shape or near-net shape parts layer-by-layer directly from computer-aided design (CAD). Additive technologies allow part design freedoms not possible with traditional fabrication methods. Complex-multiple part configurations can be constructed in a single build, thus allowing reduction in the numbers of component parts needing assembly. The objectives of the program are to:
Thus far, over 40 parts have been fabricated or are in the process of being fabricated in this RM&R AM program. Seventeen of these parts for which sufficient data are available to project cost and readiness benefits yielding:
Extending these part savings to the same weapons platform (same class of ship/sub, aircraft) yields $6.6M in cost avoidance based on a single use per system. Extrapolating the part savings to similar weapons platforms (similar classes of ship/sub, aircraft) yields $14.7M in cost avoidance based on a single use per system. Extrapolating the part savings further across all analogous DoD weapons systems (ship/sub classes, aircraft platforms, etc.) yields $99.7M in cost avoidance based on a single use per system. The NCMS Contact is Connie Philips, conniep@ncms.org, 313-618-8760. FUNDING AVAILABLE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT DoD’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) is seeking to fund environmental research and development proposals. SERDP is DoDs environmental science and technology program, planned and executed in partnership with DOE and EPA. The Program invests across the broad spectrum of basic and applied research, as well as exploratory development. SERDP pursues solutions to DoDs most intractable environmental problems. Advances in the understanding and management of DoDs resources support the long-term sustainability of training and testing ranges and facilities. Innovative environmental technologies significantly reduce current and future environmental liabilities. Proposals responding to focused Statements of Need (SON) in the following areas are requested:
Proposals responding to the Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 SONs will be selected through a competitive process. Separate solicitations are available to federal and non-federal proposers. The SONs and detailed instructions for federal and private sector proposers are available on the SERDP web site at www.serdp.org/funding. The Core SERDP Solicitation provides funding in varying amounts for multi-year projects. For the Core Solicitation, PRE-PROPOSALS FROM THE NON-FEDERAL SECTOR ARE DUE BY THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, 2010. PROPOSALS FROM THE FEDERAL SECTOR ARE DUE BY THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 2010. SERDP also will be funding environmental research and development through the SERDP Exploratory Development (SEED) Solicitation. The SEED Solicitation is designed to provide a limited amount of funding (not to exceed $150,000) for projects up to one year in duration to investigate innovative approaches that entail high technical risk and/or require supporting data to provide risk reduction or proof of concept. ALL SEED PROPOSALS ARE DUE BY THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 2010. Save the Date: 2010 CTMA Symposium “Achieve Technology Collaboration”, March 22-25, 2010. Location: The Clubs at Quantico, Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia. Expect to learn about the services technological needs, discuss the new technology roadmap now under development, and to review current CTMA project efforts in addition to tabletop displays and extensive networking opportunities. Stay tuned for more information. The NCMS contact is Debbie Lilu, debral@ncms.org, 734-995-7038. The Next Technology Showcase is being planned for February 2010, and a location still under negotiation. Stay tuned for details. We appreciate your feedback. Please contact Chuck Ryan with suggestions or input on other topics that would be of interest to you in this newsletter. The CTMA Program is sponsored by the Department of Defense; the content of this newsletter does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the government; no official endorsement should be inferred. |
