Original Date: 01/23/1995
Revision Date: 01/18/2007
Information : Manufacturing Prototyping Facility
In October 1993, the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) facility at Livermore, CA established an Integrated Manufacturing Prototyping Facility to support prototyping and integrating advanced manufacturing technologies. This 90,000 square foot facility was built with flexible reconfiguration as its prime objective. The design allows most inside and outside walls to be modified with minimum construction delays. There are large open areas with no floor or ceiling obstructions for ease of equipment layout and movement. There are both high and low bay areas for either laboratory or manufacturing demonstration facilities. The low bays have access to the roof areas where all electrical and air handling services are located. This design allows for flexibility in locating machine tools and exhaust services anywhere within the facility. All areas of the facility have access to the fiber optics communication system.
Six fiber optical pairs are routed to each work area with a multiplexer system for easy access and routing between three different communications networks at Livermore. Areas within the facility are equipped with coded personnel access controls to restrict or permit entry through a central site computer system.
This facility was designed and built to support the integrated systems approach to manufacturing technology development. It has the capability to rapidly respond to changing customer and program requirements in real time. Unlike traditional facilities with compartmentalized capabilities with fixed hard-wired equipment and infrastructures of isolated organizations, this facility provides the capability to integrate interdisciplinary teams in a common area for problem solving and collaboration on projects.
Since the facility opened in 1993, SNL has added three new customers to their customer sponsor base and are recognized as a model facility for manufacturing technology integration by DOE. They have reduced their response time for installing and qualifying equipment by 50% and have attracted world-class researchers and technologists with a two-fold increase in the PhD level in the manufacturing engineering staff.
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