Photo By Mark Schauer | The EOM lab includes a machine shop that can refurbish venerable equipment by...... read more read more
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U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) tests virtually every piece of equipment in the ground combat arsenal in some of the world’s most extreme environments.
Likewise, the equipment YPG needs to conduct its test mission is subject to the same extreme natural elements as the items under test.
Giving sensitive test equipment extra protection from heat and dust are major concerns of test crews across the proving ground, as is ensuring they are as rugged and portable as possible for treks far downrange, which usually means modifications become necessary. Further, some highly specialized items are not commercially available at all and would be cost prohibitive to attempt to have built outside the proving ground.
YPG’s Electro Optical Maintenance (EOM) lab is responsible for the maintenance, repair, and even design of a variety of equipment, from cameras and lenses to bomb-defusing robots. It also designs and fabricates custom items to support the testing work force.
“The lab fixes and repairs electronics and optical objects you find downrange,” explained Steve Taylor of YPG’s Engineering Support Branch, who oversees the lab’s work. “They also build new equipment for those who want a new item to help with a test.”
The lab includes a machine shop that can refurbish venerable equipment by manufacturing replacement parts that are no longer available on the open market, separate trailers to splice and repair fiber optic cable, and a specially filtered cleanroom to accommodate the repair of electronic equipment sensitive to dust. It’s hard to imagine a piece of test support equipment that the EOM lab’s technicians haven’t repaired or enhanced.
“Most of them have their own specialty, from optics and high-speed cameras to small surface mount circuit boards and small capacitors and resistors,” said Taylor.
Among the most fascinating pieces of equipment in the lab are three-dimensional (3D) printers that use computer aided design to make virtual designs of products that are then printed in three-dimensions with an automated, additive process. The machines melt plastics like Thermoplastic Polyurethane in various thicknesses the user chooses to produce a particular part. The machines can even admix carbon fiber to add strength to the parts.
“If it has a lot of small parts that would take a lot of time to machine, they can be printed a great deal faster, especially something small like a lens cap,” said Taylor. “Plus, you’re saving money by printing what you want instead of wasting material. In most cases, the part is so small we can have it in about 30 minutes.”
The 3D printers, however, are merely a tool to help human technicians make a wide variety of equipment, from a gun-bore inspection tool that can illuminate the interior of a gun barrel with either light-emitting diode (LED) or ultraviolet light to replacement capacitors and safety upgrades for decades-old high-intensity lighting equipment. YPG has a longstanding reputation of making short-fuse tests possible, and overcoming the obstacles that inevitably occur in testing in an expedited manner.
“If something breaks, we try to fix it as quickly as we can,” said Taylor. “Sometimes in 24 hours if a test in progress has a critical need for it.”
The shop has also recently acquired a large router table that allows for faster, more accurate cuttings of multiple parts out of a single sheet of aluminum held fast in place by a powerful vacuum compressor. The machine is fitted with eight different tools, which allows for multiple facets of a piece to be milled in one go-round rather than in multiple iterations that require new programming of the machine.
Sometimes a solution goes beyond mere repair and requires intuition. When boxes carrying GoPro cameras dropped out of aircraft during tests were difficult to recover from the desert dun, the EOM lab began fabricating the boxes in fluorescent colors that more readily stand out. Taylor recalls a vehicle test that wanted to obtain footage of an engine belt that was expected to break under test, and their under-hood camera images were too dark for adequate study. The EOM lab replaced the halogen light under the hood with an LED one to much better effect. In another instance, the lab 3-D printed an adaptor for a new thermal imaging camera to make it compatible with lenses and other highly specialized-- and expensive—accessories that were already on hand.
“It started with 3-D printing a prototype to prove it works,” said Taylor. “If we need to, we could make it out of metal, but the plastic one is working right now.”
| Date Taken: | 08.28.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 08.28.2023 09:36 |
| Story ID: | 451803 |
| Location: | YUMA PROVING GROUND, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 67 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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