Redacted_J A_Redacted.pdf

JUSTIFICATION FOR OTHER THAN

FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION

I. CONTRACTING ACTIVITY

AFTC/PZIOA

Eglin AFB, FL 32542-6862

II. NATURE AND/OR DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTION BEING PROCESSED

The requirement will provide equipment through a new firm-fixed price contract with Artium Technologies, Inc. for two Dual Range Phase Doppler Interferometer (PDI) Flight Probes and two High Speed Imaging (HSI) Flight Probes. These probes are specifically designed for aircraft-based icing cloud studies that require precise measurement of liquid droplet (PDI or HSI) and ice crystal (HSI) size distributions, velocity distribution, number density, liquid water content (LWC) or ice water content (IWC), and median volume distribution (MVD). The two new PDI probes will provide continuing icing measurement capability at MCL using the latest technology with maintenance spares provision. The HSI probes may also be utilized for measurements required for characterizing snow crystal habit, size, and concentration for falling and blowing snow ingestion testing of jet engines and APUs. Additionally, the HSI probes may be used to characterize large droplets associated with falling and blowing rain.

III. DESCRIPTION OF THE SUPPLIES/SERVICES REQUIRED TO MEET THE

AGENCY’S NEEDS

Under the contemplated contract Artium Technologies, Inc. will provide the following supplies and services:

1. Two (2) complete Dual Range PDI Flight Probes – each PDI system to include:

a. Compact, rugged, sealed, flight certified canister. High power 500mW DPSS laser.

Customer defined two fixed overlapping size ranges each 200:1 within overall size capability range of 0.3 to 5000 micron. Customer defined power 24-96VDC, 110- 240VAC, 50-400Hz. 10m cable.

b. Cartridge and film heaters internal to the Flight Probe to maximum of 5KW. Multiple, independent heater zones with temperature control integrated into AIMS software.

c. 20m cable, can be coupled to 10m cable.

d. Advanced Signal Analyzer - Size and Velocity Processor.

e. Automated Instrument Management System (AIMS) software – PDI.

f. Temperature controlled electronics enclosure to allow placement of electronics closer to the probe.

g. Laptop, Fiber Optic connection from Processors to computer for remote operation, CAT6 for control >200 feet.

h. System computer -- 3.2GHz Eight core CPU, 4GB RAM, 1TB SSD, monitor.

i. Shipping and handling.

j. Installation and training by an Artium engineer.

k. One year warranty on parts and labor.

l. Delivery, installation and training on these items will be completed 180 days after award of contract and 3600 appropriations will fund this effort.

2. Two complete HSI Custom Dual Range Configuration Probe Systems – each HSI system to include:

a. Temperature controlled and de-iced custom housing, 6 laser illumination, 300 frames/second frame rate, size range 7 µm to 5000 µm.

b. Image acquisition and processing software, features size distributions, particle characteristics based on shape, automatic sorting on selected parameters, programmable validation logic, LWC, running MVD.

c. System computers – 3.2GHz 8-core CPU, 4GB RAM, 1TB SSD, monitor, system interface to camera.

d. Temperature controlled electronics enclosure to allow placement of electronics closer to probe.

e. Laptop and wireless router for remote operation.

f. Shipping and handling.

g. Installation and training by an Artium engineer.

h. One year warranty on parts and labor.

i. Delivery, installation and training on these items will be completed 180 days after award of contract and 3600 appropriations will fund this effort.

IV. STATUTORY AUTHORITY PERMITTING OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN

COMPETITION

41 USC 1901, as implemented by FAR 13.5 Test Program for Certain Commercial Items.

V. DEMONSTRATION THAT THE CONTRACTOR’S UNIQUE

QUALIFICATIONS OR NATURE OF THE ACQUISITION REQUIRES THE USE OF

THE AUTHORITY CITED ABOVE (APPLICABILITY OF AUTHORITY)

The McKinley Climatic Laboratory is a unique and highly specialized climatic test facility. Nearly every type of weather found in nature can be simulated in the facility on full-scale, operational equipment, including airplanes, helicopters, and jet engines. There are several types of climatic conditions for which the Artium PDI and HSI probes are needed;

1. Part 25 Appendix C Icing. Several types of icing conditions are currently simulated; specifically ground fog and high speed in-flight icing, characterized by small droplet size (median volume diameter between 15 and 50 microns) and composed of super cooled liquid droplets (droplets that are colder than 32° F, but are not frozen into ice). These icing conditions are considered to be the typical icing conditions that the FAA has required airframe and engine manufacturers to test within for at least the last 50 years or more.

Since approximately 2002, MCL has conducted icing tests in accordance with FAA icing regulations (Part 25, Appendix C) for icing certification. Since approximately 2008, measurements of these cloud simulations have been made using an Artium Dual Range PDI.

This instrument has been very successfully used for measurements necessary for this type of testing, although the technology used in this probe is now becoming dated and obsolete.

Artium’s latest versions of this probe have up to date electronics and will continue to be well suited for making Appendix C measurements for many years into the future. For Appendix C icing work, there are sometimes circumstances in which the PDI measurements show large droplet size values and it is uncertain whether those values are actual real droplets in the spray or whether the probe head optics have become misaligned due to high thermal gradients from the on-board anti-icing heating experienced during highly convective airflow over the probe head.

The solution to answer this question is to use an Artium HSI imaging probe mounted in tandem with the PDI; which would immediately answer the question by either confirming or refuting the presence of large particles. So both instruments are needed for Appendix C icing measurements.

2. Part 25 Appendix O Icing. As of Nov 2014, there is a new FAA aircraft safety regulation regarding icing conditions described as supercooled large drops (SLD) which include particle sizes that are as large as several thousand microns. This requirement was developed as a result of an aircraft accident in 1994 in which 68 people died. The NTSB’s recommendation to the FAA was to identify the meteorological conditions that caused the accident and begin requiring airframe and engine manufacturers to test in those conditions. Due to significant difficulties in measuring these icing conditions, it took the FAA, NASA, and Environment Canada approximately 20 years to understand how to apply icing instrumentation measurements to determine the test conditions and develop the new regulation.

Currently, there are no facilities in the world that can produce all of the conditions required by the new regulation. MCL currently has a limited ability to create some (but not all of) these kinds of conditions and is planning to design and fabricate a new icing system in order to create the needed environments. The current PDI cannot measure SLD sized droplets; the validity of the PDI measurements for large particles comes into question because the Phase Doppler technique relies on droplets being spherical and the larger the droplets are, the lower their sphericity, and therefore the measurement technique breaks down. Artium’s HSI probe, however, is an imaging probe; it takes a shadowgraph picture of particles that pass through its measurement area and then analyzes the images. It can easily measure large particles (liquid droplets or ice crystals) associated with SLD icing.

3. Part 33 Appendix D Icing. As of Nov 2014, there is another new FAA aircraft safety regulation regarding icing conditions which include fully glaciated (all ice crystals) clouds. This regulation was developed as a result of a high frequency of occurrence of reported engine flameouts at high altitude. The FAA has currently amassed a database of more than 100 incidents where commercial aircraft have reported one or more engines quitting in-flight at high altitude when encountering fully glaciated (all ice crystal) clouds. To date, there have been no crashes, nor any fatalities. However, one incident resulted in a business jet making a dead stick landing (no power) at an airport because they could not get either engine restarted. Another incident reports a commercial passenger jet flying over the ocean which had all four engines quit and was able to get the second engine restarted (minimum power needed to maintain level flight) approximately 1,000 feet above the water. As a result of this rapidly growing database, the FAA has taken immediate steps to begin having airframe and engine manufacturers test in these types of conditions.

Again, as with SLD conditions, there are currently no facilities in the world that can create the conditions required by the new regulations, with some caveats; 1) developed a shaved ice injection capability about 10 years ago with mixed success due to difficulties controlling crystal size and concentration, and 2) over the last two years, has installed a capability to freeze out a liquid spray in a small engine tunnel ; also with mixed success due to difficulties getting large droplets to completely freeze. MCL currently has the ability to freeze out the Appendix C icing droplets, but the droplets are generally much too small to satisfy the requirements of the new regulation which requires ice crystals with median size up to 200 microns. MCL is planning to design and fabricate a new icing system in order to create the needed environments. The current PDI cannot measure ice crystals at all; it can only measure transparent spherical liquid droplets and frozen ice crystals are neither transparent, nor are they perfectly spherical. Artium’s HSI probe is an imaging probe; it takes a shadowgraph picture of particles that pass through its measurement area and then analyzes the images. It can easily measure ice crystals within the necessary size range.

4. Part 25 1093 Falling and Blowing Snow. This environment has been an FAA requirement for Part 23, Part 25, and Part 29 (small aircraft, large aircraft, and helicopters, respectively) for many years. This requirement specifies snow concentration of nearly 1 gram of ice per cubic meter of air (equivalent to ¼ mile visibility) but does not explicitly require a particular crystal size.

MCL is the only known facility that achieves this test condition using artificially generated snow;

otherwise, applicants do this testing in natural snow conditions. At MCL, the snow is created using the same type of snow machines used as ski resorts to make artificial snow. The snow is composed of ice crystals with particle sizes up to 500 microns. The existing PDI cannot measure ice crystals because they are not transparent, nor are they spherical. MCL has recently conducted an in-house experiment to investigate whether other instruments (already owned by MCL) can be used to measure the falling and blowing snow environment, including the laser interferometer, a Land Opacity Monitor (currently used to measure MIL-STD-810 dust environment), and a Visibility Sensor (typically used to measure fog at airport runways).

None of these instruments were designed to measure snow and have proven to be unsuitable for making accurate measures of the snow environment. MCL has also recently conducted some experiments using the Artium HSI imaging probe with far better success. Although there is still more investigative work that needs to be done to interpret results from this instrument in distinguishing between wet and dry snow, it has already demonstrated that it is more suitable for measuring snow than any other instrument that MCL has been able to identify.

EVALUATION OF POTENTIAL VENDOR EQUIPMENT

Even with the latest technology, there are very few instruments known in the world which attempt to measure these cloud parameters in-situ inside icing clouds. The entire icing community has struggled for decades to find suitable instruments for this application with mixed results. In-situ icing clouds are an exceptionally difficult environment to measure. Droplets sizes can be microscopic or as large as rain drops and no instrument has the optical resolution to cover the entire range, the instruments typically are very difficult to keep ice-free and the ice accretions on the instruments affect the measurements. The necessary heating required to keep instruments ice free is often sufficient to impose thermal stresses so high that the instruments become misaligned. Some of the instruments are not designed for in-flight conditions and are not aerodynamic in any way. They can be used for some applications with mixed results. The instruments typically do not agree on the measured particle size, even when simultaneously measuring the same cloud, despite all instruments being calibrated; and all the manufactures make the same statement that their instrument is providing the correct measurement and all the others are incorrect.

MCL has used Artium Dual Range PDI probes of various configurations since approximately 2008 with very good success for typical Appendix C ground fog and in-flight icing tests. This instrument has various issues, but primarily with regard to the purpose of this document, it is suitable for measuring liquid icing cloud droplets that are not larger than a few hundred microns in diameter; it is not suitable for measuring ice crystals, or for measuring large droplets required by the new FAA regulations. The phase Doppler technique relies on spherical droplets (and the larger the droplets, the less sphericity they have) and also rely on the droplets to be transparent so that light can refract through the drop (and ice crystals do not refract light the same as liquid water). Therefore, in addition to the need for a new PDI, an Aritum HSI instrument is needed to cover the environments that the PDI is not suitable for; namely large drops in App C icing, large drops in App O icing, ice crystals for App D icing, and rain studies.

MCL has used with some success, the diffraction based ensemble characterization instrument (which is not designed for high speed in situ measurements) since approximately 2002. It can be used for ground fog icing but high speed icing presents many problems; the instrument has no anti-icing capability whatsoever (accretes ice very quickly which affects the measurements), is not designed with aerodynamics in mind, and is range limited – it cannot measure drops at large diameters required by the new SLD regulations. Also, the new FAA regulation regarding fully glaciated (all ice crystals) clouds requires median size of up to 200 microns, which implies that part of the spectrum must be composed of ice crystals significantly larger than 200 microns, beyond the size limitation for the , i.e. the does NOT have the size range to measure fully glaciated clouds required by the new regulation.

A similar instrument also using diffraction based measurements is offered by SPEC, but suffers from the same issues described for probes. These types of probes are typically used (more suitably) for measuring icing clouds within small wind tunnels whereby the laser transmitter and detector array canisters may be located on either side of the wind tunnel with the laser beam projecting through windows mounted in the sides of the tunnel. MCL is NOT an icing wind tunnel. MCL creates very large open jet icing clouds which are far too large for separating the transmitter and receiver heads – and there are no tunnel walls to contain the flow; the required instrument must be suitable for in-situ measurements, with the transmitter and receiver optical head fully engulfed in the icing cloud and subject to severe icing.

Many years ago, developed the and the to conduct in-situ icing cloud measurements. These instruments have been the icing industry standard for several decades for Appendix C icing conditions.

These instruments were never intended for (and are not suitable for) Appendix O conditions. The instrument would cover Appendix D conditions, but no longer manufactures this instrument.

recently sold all rights for its icing probes to another company and no longer supports this kind of product.

Even when they did sell icing probes, there were disagreements within the icing community regarding the validity of measurements during high concentrations due to high data rates. Their probes also were range limited and required multiple probes with different range optics which had to be combined or merged in post-processing to obtain full particle size distributions. MCL does not manipulate data in post-processing, but instead must rely on real-time measurements; hence the need for dual range probes.

bought the rights to all probes. They do not sell the original designed probes, but instead offer similar probes of their own design based on the same principles of operation as the probes. Those instruments are specifically designed for in-situ, in-flight icing environments, but suffer from the same issues that have proven problematic for the probes. They are range limited; so multiple probes are required and their measurements must be combined as a post-processing operation to combine or merge the data to obtain full distributions.

Additionally, recent tests of the icing probes within the Icing Research Tunnel have demonstrated that although the small range probe does provide acceptable data, the large range probe provides data that may still be open to interpretation. The large range probe is an imaging probe similar to the Artium HSI probe but with lower resolution.

In summary, there are a very few icing probes available world-wide that are used for in-situ in-flight icing cloud measurements. All of them have issues that have implications for their suitability for using them in a laboratory environment like MCL for aviation regulatory certification testing. The new technology Artium PDI is needed to replace the obsolete PDI that is currently being used. It has been specifically designed for in situ icing cloud measurements; it is aerodynamic, has anti-icing capability, and has dual optical range to cover the entire Appendix C icing envelope to provide near real-time (no post-processing) measurements. Although by itself, the Artium HSI’s lower limit in optical range prevents the instrument from being used solely for typical Appendix C ground fog or in-flight icing, it can be used alongside the dual range PDI probe to provide a validation whether large particles are truly present. It also is suitable for sizing and determining concentration of ice crystals required by the new FAA regulations and has also proven useful in experimental tests to validate ice crystal concentrations in snow ingestion testing of engines and APUs. Additionally, the HSI does have sufficient range to cover a very wide array of conditions needed at MCL which include both the new FAA regulation environments for SLD conditions as well as studies needed to measure large rain drops. Finally, an additional benefit to the Government is that the new PDI and HSI systems use many similar components (and similar as well with the previously purchased PDI system). The Artium Dual Range (PDI) and Dual Range HSI probes are the only instruments that can provide suitable measurements for a wide range of icing, snow, and rain test environments that will meet the needs of MCL without a substantial duplication of cost to the government that is not expected to be recovered through competition.

VI. DESCRIPTION OF EFFORTS MADE TO ENSURE THAT OFFERS ARE

SOLICITED FROM AS MANY POTENTIAL SOURCES AS DEEMED PRACTICABLE

Market research was conducted for this acquisition to include Google searches, speaking with other industry professionals and testing other vendor’s instruments as stated in paragraph V above, communicating with other climatic labs, along with NASA to determine if another manufacturer could provide this HSI flight probe. No other vendors were located other than the one known source.

VII. DETERMINATION BY THE CONTRACTING OFFICER THAT THE

ANTICIPATED COST TO THE GOVERNMENT WILL BE FAIR AND REASONABLE

The Contracting Officer anticipates the cost to the Government is to be fair and reasonable based on price analysis in accordance with FAR 13.106-3(a). All proposals will be evaluated by the government technical representatives prior to award.

VIII. DESCRIPTION OF THE MARKET RESEARCH CONDUCTED AND THE

RESULTS, OR A STATEMENT OF THE REASONS MARKET RESEARCH WAS NOT

CONDUCTED

See section VI above.

IX. ANY OTHER FACTS SUPPORTING THE USE OF OTHER THAN FULL AND

OPEN COMPETITION

None.

X. LIST OF SOURCES, IF ANY, THAT EXPRESSED INTEREST IN THE

ACQUISITION

See section VI above.

XI. A STATEMENT OF THE ACTIONS, IF ANY, THE AGENCY MAY TAKE TO

REMOVE OR OVERCOME ANY BARRIERS TO COMPETITION BEFORE MAKING

SUBSEQUENT ACQUISITIONS FOR THE SUPPLIES OR SERVICES REQUIRED

McKinley Climatic Laboratory (782 TS/RNWPC) will continue to monitor the industry through perusal of trade journals, technical symposiums, and contact with industry representatives. Any future requirements will be researched and if a product meeting the requirements is identified then a competitive acquisition for the requirement will be considered.

XII. CONTRACTING OFFICER’S CERTIFICATION

The contracting officer’s signature on the Coordination and Approval Document evidences that he/she has determined this document to be both accurate and complete to the best of his/her knowledge and belief (FAR 13.5 USC).

XIII. TECHNICAL/REQUIREMENTS PERSONNEL’S CERTIFICATION

As evidenced by their signatures on the Coordination and Approval Document, the technical and/or requirements personnel have certified that any supporting data contained herein, which is their responsibility, is both accurate and complete.

http://farsite.hill.af.mil/reghtml/regs/far2afmcfars/fardfars/far/06.htm