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| August 2010
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. We welcome the following companies into NCMS: Parker SCITech Group, LLC (www.parkerscitech.com) Parker SCITech Group is a consulting organization focused on systems engineering, information assurance and program management for manufacturing and engineering organizations.General Lasertronics Corporation (www.lasertronics.com) General Lasertronics designs and manufactures semi-custom laser-based coatings removal, surface treatment and cleaning systems for military, commercial aircraft and nuclear decontamination applications. Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony at Tobyhanna Army Depot (TYAD) Automated Intensifier Measurement System (AIMS) Wednesday, 29 September 2010 This CTMA project has developed and deployed, with TYAD, automated test equipment for night vision tubes which has the ability to replace the outdated manual test equipment presently used by government and industry. This capability will reduce cycle time for returned night vision devices and significantly reduce costs by increasing the reuse of image intensifier tubes. Some 10,000 tubes are returned annually from the field and are demilitarized (destroyed) due to a lack of retest verification. However, image intensifier tubes classified for demil in the field have subsequently successfully passed MIL-specs during reevaluations. This automated equipment will be capable of rapidly performing all optical A-tests as required by government and industry for image intensifier tubes. Implementation of this automated test capability will provide better test repeatability, reproducibility, and improve cycle time versus the present manual test equipment. If you are interested in attending this ceremony and demonstration, send an email to Debbie Lilu at debral@ncms.org.
Recently Completed CTMA Project: Legacy Lifecycle Management DoD Participants: Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center (OC-ALC); Defense Logistics Agency (DLA); Letterkenny Army Depot (LEAD); Fleet Readiness Center (FRC) East This CTMA project had two primary objectives:
To assist ballooning processes, the project team developed intelligent Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology with a dictionary that includes General Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) symbols as well as both machine generated and handwritten alpha-numeric symbols. Artificial intelligence built into the OCR technology allows it to learn with use so that recognition accuracy improves over time. A key feature of the solution is that it divides the drawing into zones, separating drawing from title and notes blocks, which enables the use of specialized dictionaries for each zone, also improving recognition accuracy. To demonstrate a secure supplier collaboration environment, the project team leveraged learning from the Transatlantic Secure Collaboration Program (TSCP) which had already defined the requirements and architecture for a web-enabled system. Team partner Rolls-Royce was also a member of the TSCP and therefore had access to information not publically available. The foundation on which secure collaboration rests is a digital certificate system that requires State Department registration for companies that will receive restricted data (suppliers) plus a digital certificate from Certipath that can be used to validate both individual identity and company authorization to work with restricted data. The NCMS contact is Tony Haynes, tonyh@ncms.org, 734-995-4930. 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. |
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