Notice of Intent to Sole Source

Notice of Intent to Sole Source, IAW FAR 6.302-1(10 U.S.C. 2304(c)(1)), Only One Responsible Source and No Other Supplies Will Satisfy Agency Requirements; whereby Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC), Arnold AFB, TN, intends to award a contract to MedTherm Corporation, 2604 Newby Rd SW, Huntsville AL 35805-4223.

The agency does not intend to issue a solicitation package. However, all interested parties should self-identify and provide proof of their firm's capability to provide the prescribed equipment/product(s) by submitting an accurate description of the equipment/product(s) and process to produce the equipment/product(s) described below. Responsible sources may submit a capability statement, proposal, or quotation, which shall be considered by AEDC.

Interested parties are hereby informed that no award will be made on the basis of responses received. Responses must be electronically sent to Miriam James (miriam.james@us.af.mil). If no favorable responses are received by the date and time indicated in this notice, a contract will be negotiated with the above named source.
Interested offerors should refer to the attached specification for a complete description of the equipment/products(s) required.

Coaxial Thermocouple

The majority of the heat transfer measurements made in the AEDC Hypervelocity Wind Tunnel 9 facility have been collected using coaxial thermocouples mounted directly into a stainless steel substrate (15-5PH or 17-4PH stainless steel) test article. Typical wall thickness of the steel substrate generally ranges between 0.5"-0.25" and interior volume to route lead wires can be limited. These installation limitations require the sensor length to be similar to the wall thickness and the transition from the sensor shell to the lead wires must occur close to the base of the sensor. Finally, a thin layer of temperature sensitive paint is often applied directly on the wind tunnel model after the coaxial thermocouples have been installed and contoured to the test article.
Type-E, Chromel-Constantan, coaxial thermocouples have been successfully utilized in the unique and stressing Tunnel 9 hypervelocity test environment due to their high durability, fast-response times and their ability to be contoured to the outer mold lines of the test article. Surface temperature response is acquired during the test run using a coaxial thermocouple and the heat transfer is derived using the coaxial thermocouple temperature data as boundary condition to a finite-differencing solution of the transient heat conduction equation for a finite thickness wall.
Sensor installation and data utilization techniques have been optimized at Tunnel 9 using coaxial thermocouples to provide highly accurate temperature/heat transfer measurements in Tunnel 9.

Coaxial thermocouples are required for almost every test program conducted in Tunnel 9, therefore, AEDC requires common models that include the TCS-E-061-XX-YY-10964 and TCS-E-031-XX-YY-10937, where the variables XX and YY specify the sensor and lead wire lengths, respectively.