Engineering Metrology Services (EMS) was founded in 1992 and
offers industrial coordinate measurement services, engineering design, and software
consulting. Since its inception, we have measured and aligned radio telescopes, radar
antennas, satellite communication
antennas, and compact antenna test
range reflectors. We have also designed measurement tooling and antenna systems. More
information is available at the EMS web site http://www.engr-metr.com.
We provide CAD design services, specialty
analysis software, and industrial measurement services. Customers include Raytheon Co.,
Allied Signal, Radiation Systems, Inc., Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Harvard
Center for Astrophysics, Mission Research Corp., Atlantic Microwave, and MIT's Lincoln
Laboratory.
EMS design challenges
For a consulting company, the biggest challenge is usually
making connections with companies who need our services. Once that is accomplished, the
rest is just hard work. Our customers demand accuracy, flexibility, timely response, and
support. To meet these requirements, we often travel globally. EMS has worked on six
continents, and we’re hoping to be sent to Antarctica soon. Last year we worked in
Taiwan, California and Kwajalein. This year we’ll do field work in Alaska and Norway.
Sweden and Alaska are on the calendar for next year.
To help us do our work we use SolidWorks for CAD design,
SurfaceWorks for specialized surfaces for custom dish antennas, Visual Basic for software
development, and MathCAD for generating analytical reports. We plan to start using
CosmosWorks FEA software in the near future. SurfaceWorks has allowed EMS to expand the
scope of its design work on specialized surfaces for compact range reflector antennas. We
can now do more than we once could in less time. SurfaceWorks enables us to realize
greater productivity, improved design flexibility, and timely response to customers.
Recent project
EMS is
currently under contract to design and install a 21-foot compact antenna test range
reflector for a major aerospace contractor. The indoor test facility will be completed in
the autumn of 1999 and used to measure the Radar Cross Section (RCS) of military aircraft
components.
Unlike dish antennas used on satellite
communication systems, the low-noise and low-frequency operation of this test range
requires a complex "rolled-edge" wrap-around reflector surface. The surface was
developed by the ElectroScience Laboratory of the Ohio State University (OSU) for its
low-noise characteristics. OSU provided it to EMS as a regular grid of more than 10,000
points in space. We used Visual Basic to format the points into rows, which were then
imported into SurfaceWorks and built up into C-spline curves and then C-spline surfaces. A
total of fourteen surfaces were knit together to make a solid curved object 16 feet wide
by 14 feet high by four feet deep. The solid object was then imported into SolidWorks.
There it was shelled, divided into seven discrete panels, and stiffened with ribs, bosses,
and plates. The panels are currently being cast at a foundry in Franklin, OH.
We selected SurfaceWorks because of its compatibility with
SolidWorks and its ability to create surfaces from imported point data. The learning curve
was pretty quick. After reading the critical portions of the manual, we went through the
tutorial step-by-step, and did some experimental runs to get a feel for things. Then we
started on the real project. When we got stuck we got some very valuable pointers from the
SurfaceWorks technical support staff, who also critiqued an early version of the surface
model. From our first look at SurfaceWorks until we had a completed a surface model of the
reflector was about three to four weeks.
SurfaceWorks benefits
We can now complete 20% of the design job that we previously
had to subcontract out to others. In the case of the project described below, this brought
about $25,000 of consulting in-house. This has given us a competitive advantage,
simplified project management, given us much greater in-house control over technical
details and schedules, and allowed us to offer a totally integrated solution.
Trends in the marketplace
In this reflector project we have been able to place
"virtual reality" images of the design in-progress on the EMS web site at http://www.engr-metr.com/current.html in
which our customer and manufacturing partners can zoom in, rotate, pan, and generally
travel around and through various design options. This has streamlined decision-making,
eliminated the need for time-consuming meetings, and saved money and time.
The foundry engineers doing the castings can get a good
early feel for what they’ll be building, right on our web site. Later we’ll be
placing DXF-format files on the web for ready-access by our sheet-metal manufacturing
partners.
