The CTMA Connector

December 2003

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. 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 subject line.

Initial Agenda: 2004 CTMA Working Symposium, March 29 – April 1

Location: Emory Conference Center Hotel, Atlanta, GA

On-Line Registration will begin early January. website: http://ctma.ncms.org

Monday, March 29 Pre-Symposium Workshops

Tuesday, March 30

Morning plenary session: Capabilities and Needs in Manufacturing and Repair

Colonel Gerald Bates, Commanding Officer, Anniston Army Depot

Major General Donald Wetekam, Commanding Officer, Warner Robins Air Logistics Center

Debra Walker, US Air Force

Major General Richardson, US Army (invited)

Ken Trammell, US Marines

James Brice, US Navy

Courtney J. Hill, GE Aircraft Engines

Brad Pedersen, United Technologies (invited)

Tuesday Afternoon and Wednesday morning track sessions reviewing ongoing projects supported by DoD

Track 1: Metals (chair: Greg Woods, US Navy)

Track 2: Composites and Lightweight Structures (chair: Clifford Wolfe, DLA)

Track 3: Electronics (chair: Upendra Patel, US Army)

Track 4: Advanced Manufacturing and Testing (chair: Al Wavering, NIST)

Tuesday Evening Reception and Table Top Displays from active projects

Wednesday Luncheon speaker – Brigadier General Arthur Morrill III, Director of Resources, DCS/Installations & Logistics

Wednesday afternoon: Facilitated Workshops to identify new projects

Workshop 1: Metals (Facilitator:Tony Haynes, NCMS)

Workshop 2: Composites and Lightweight Structures (Fac:Steve Hale, NCMS)

Workshop 3: Electronics (Facilitator:Lee Patch, NCMS)

Workshop 4: Advanced Manufacturing and Testing (Fac:Connie Philips, NCMS)

Thursday, April 1 – facility tours (Anniston Army Depot; Lockheed Martin)

We welcome the following organizations as participants in the CTMA program:

Cubic Systems, Inc.

Cubic Systems designs and manufactures embedded test, measurement, and control equipment for networked applications

Portal Dynamics, Inc.

Portal Dynamics is an information technology and systems integration company developing web-based, integrated, collaborative work solutions.

New Project Approved:

Legacy Test Program Set (TPS) Migration System

DoD participants: Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, Tobyhanna Army Depot, Naval Air Depot Cherry Point, US Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center Aging Aircraft Division

Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) is used by all Department of Defense (DoD) Maintenance enterprises to:

Test electronic systems and components
Isolate system malfunctions
Verify functional performance

Electronics repair facilities continue to support legacy test systems well beyond their life expectancies. The retention of the outdated repair capability jeopardizes weapon system availability. Costs associated with migrating or redeveloping software is the primary impediment to replacing legacy test systems. Depending on test system loading, test software migration costs can approach 20 times the cost of the replacement test system. As test systems become completely unsupportable, technologies are needed that can reduce the cost of test software migration.

DoD maintenance and repair facilities spend tens of millions dollars annually to update unsustainable depot test systems that are used to test a wide variety of electronic systems. It is estimated that over 50% of the annual recurring expense could be avoided if an automated means existed for re-hosting the associated test program sets to the automated test equipment stations. This project will extend a proven methodology used in the design of Teradyne’s TPS Converter Studio product for migrating test programs written for the Teradyne L-Series functional board tester family to the modern Spectrum 9100 tester family. The product has been in commercial use for over two years, and users report 90 – 99% translation rates and function coverage for digital test programs. The project will broaden the number of legacy source languages supported, and make the result of legacy TPS migration target system independent.

NCMS project manager is Lee Patch, leep@ncms.org, 734-995-4972.

Recently Completed Projects:

Lasershot Peening of Landing Gear Components

A variety of landing gear components are failing without having reached their desired service lives. The failures are due primarily to stress corrosion cracking (SCC) and fatigue. The objective of this project was to improve the fatigue life and SCC resistance through the application of laser peening technology to selected components. The project focused upon the T-38 main landing gear aluminum side-brace trunnion, which had a history of SCC failures in the transition radius. A material change in the trunnion corrected the SCC failures, but fatigue failures increased at the same location. The trunnion transmits side loads from the main landing gear through a side brace to the aircraft frame. In addition, the trunnion also contains a linear extension-retraction actuator, which when extended or retracted, rotates the trunnion. The maximum stresses in the transition radius of the trunnion are from the extension and retraction loads the aircraft experiences in service.

The peening process compresses the material just below the surface, resulting in a residual compressed load. When tensile stresses are applied to the material, the overall amount of stress is reduced since the material starts out under compression. This reduced stress thus leads to improvement in fatigue life and SCC. Typically, steel shot is used to peen the surface of the metal part, which compresses the top 0.25 mm of the component. However, lasers have seen increasing use for peening the surface of the part. A laser pulse creates a shock wave that drives a residual stress up to 2 mm deep into the metal part. The increased depth of peening helps prevent crack propagation, and imparts superior performance.

The concept of laser peening is not new, but has not been cost effective compared to conventional peening. The project team developed a more economically favorable system, which pulses at a rate 20 times faster than other available systems and can peen about one square meter of metal per hour. Thus laser peening can compete with shot peening for application on fatigue critical parts.

The project demonstrated that shot and laser peening significantly increased the fatigue life of 7049-T73 aluminum. These results are captured in the following table:

Surface Treatment	Relative Fatigue Life Improvement
Surface Treatment	40 ksi stress level	50 ksi stress level	60 ksi stress level
None	1	1	1
Steel shot peened	18	2.4	1.5
Laser peened	>21	4.8	2.9

Further information is available from the NCMS project manager, Chuck Ryan, chuckr@ncms.org, 734-995-4905.