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Photo courtesy of Agusta Westland
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Balancing cost and design integrity - with the days of cost-plus confined to the history books, modern defence contractors and OEM’s alike naturally demand value for money. However, what are the true program costs?
Considering only the direct purchase costs associated with the equipment itself while neglecting or de-emphasizing the wider aspects of a project could ultimately prove costly, in more ways than one! |
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The Figure below shows the position Elma-Mektron endeavours to adopt when designing a custom turnkey system enclosure, namely the ‘centre-ground’. This position has nothing at all to do with politics but everything to do with balancing design and production costs with design integrity.
Successfully deploying COTS hardware such as VME in defence sectors depends on well-engineered system enclosure technology. Indeed, a key system enclosure function is mitigating many of the hostile environmental operating conditions the COTS hardware will be subjected to in real-life, including:
- Shock / vibration
- High / low temperature
- High humidity
- Moisture
- Salt mist and fog
- Low pressure (high altitude)
- Nuclear and biological contamination (NBC)
- Fluid contamination
- Dust / sand
- Power interruptions / brownouts
- Power input spikes and surges
Additionally developers often call upon the system enclosure and supporting hardware infrastructure to meet stringent EMC requirements. Such requirements could include:
- Radiated emissions
- Conducted emissions
- Radiated susceptibility
- Conducted susceptibility
- Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (NEMP)
- TEMPEST
From a turnkey defence enclosure supplier’s perspective, adopting a ‘holistic’ systems approach is essential. Such an approach requires fully understanding the fragility nature of the active COTS hardware and ‘in-service’ modes of operation, or in military speak; “con-ops” (concept of operations).
Given the functional, environmental, EMC and operational considerations discussed above and as illustrated in the Figure below, it’s easy to visualize the difficult balancing act that must be performed.
Striking the correct design integrity balance necessitates properly interpreting the enclosure requirement as a whole, while difficulties clearly result from a failure to do so.
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