Battelle, AMCOM, Changing Sustainment For Fielded Aviation, Missiles

Defense Daily, Sept 24, 2008

By Ann Roosevelt

Battelle and the Army Aviation and Missile Command (AMCOM) are working together on the Continuous Technology Refreshment (CTR) program to address the decades old problem of obsolescence and technology insertion for fielded weapon systems, according to an official.

"We currently have about 20 parts in process that we calculated a savings to the Army of over $850 million over a 10-year period of time," Ken Noland, Battelle Marketing Director for AMCOM, told Defense Daily.

The primary issue is that managers of fielded weapons systems have no ability, flexibility or legal authority to use the Army working capital funds for engineering studies or analysis to develop new designs.

"A fielded weapons system in most cases no longer has the availability of R&D, procurement or modernization dollars; it goes away once the system is fielded," he said. Additionally, once fielded, small vendors sometimes no longer make parts, making them expensive to reproduce. Thus, fielded weapons face concerns over obsolescence and old technology.

Battelle, the world's largest non-profit research and development company, is constantly looking for ways to insert technology, and find ways to reduce the burden of cost, Noland said.

Then, Battelle came up with a concept model: "We'll go in and re-engineer a replacement part for those obsolete parts that you're using and then you [Army] just simply buy them from us," Noland said. "Instead of buying the old part, you buy the new part. The new part is form, fit and function, plug in, but it doesn't necessarily look the same. It fits in the same place and it hooks up the same way, but yet it may be a totally new technology."

For example, the first was the Caution Advisory Panel (CAP) for the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, he said. The 1970s-era CAP sits in the center of the cockpit and is comprised of five individual circuit cards, each with its own function, a large number of interconnect devices and 82 individual cells, each with two incandescent light bulbs--a constant failure issue. This was not because of obsolescence, but it was old and difficult to keep up and operational. Pilots had to have light bulbs available as replacements because, if they didn't light up, the helicopter couldn't take off. The cells all had to work.

Battelle took on the CAP and designed a replacement that ended up with two circuit cards, one of which has LEDs. New technology was included on the replacement CAP to include programmable devices on the circuit cards.

"We ended up refreshing an almost $12,000 item and designed and manufactured a replacement that now costs $4,800. And saved them $18 million on their near term buys right off the bat," Noland said.

Additionally, a night vision capability was solved, he said. The old CAP was built before night vision systems became ubiquitous and when the incandescent bulbs came on they would wash out the pilots' night vision goggles. Battelle added night vision filters.

The new Battelle CAP "hooks up exactly the same way the old one does, operates exactly the same way, we used basically the same color of LED," Noland said. "However, you go from 180 hours of operational life of an incandescent light bulb to over a million hours with an LED."

The new parts are designed to easily and quickly accommodate further design changes.

"The key to the whole solution is you've got to plug in and operate seamless to the rest of the system, which is in and of itself an engineering challenge," he said.

Battelle is starting to work on the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter, and recently submitted a proposal on one of the parts. Right now, Battelle is working on 17 to 18 parts for the helicopter.

"In reality, we are replacing a part that's already in the system," he said. "We are essentially able to define and calibrate and get the inputs and outputs of most items in the system."

Battelle's strength is in its engineering capability that is able to capture what each item has to do with or without the benefit of documentation and reengineering. Its engineers can come up with a solution very quickly and come back with the technology replacement that has the benefits desired by the Army.

Though Battelle does not have its own products, it does the market research to ensure the product they find as the solution is an exact fit. "We address each issue individually and develop products for a specific need rather than using an off the shelf solution," he said.

The CTR concept can spread beyond AMCOM.

"It will work for anything that's electronic, avionics. It will work for M1 tanks. It will work for trucks. It will work for anything the Army has with an electronic system," Noland said.

Current regulations support this in referring to technology refreshment, by requiring post-production support strategy for all weapons.

"We now have a regulatory backup for this program," he said. "You need to build within your post production support a technology refreshment strategy."