From lserna at nrao.edu Wed Feb 4 14:42:17 2009 From: lserna at nrao.edu (Lew Serna) Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:42:17 -0700 Subject: [Escoordminutes] ES Coordination minutes- Feb 3 Message-ID: <4989EF99.3010403@aoc.nrao.edu> Minutes for the ES Division Coordination Meeting held on Tuesday, February 03, 2009 at 10:30 am, in the LL CB conference room. Attending were Lew Serna, Charley Chavez, Bob Broilo, Gene Cole, Brent Avery, Ramon Gutierrez, and Jon Thunborg. BUDGET --- Until further notice, spent accounts at 80% of your normal allotment. Do not make major purchases for Track Material. Fuel Tank compliance funds are made available but no other special projects are funded as yet. VLBA Foundations (BR, NL) and Generator Repairs are high on the wish list for FY2009. VLBA -- MK (August tentatively), and KP (May or June tentatively) are scheduled for this year (FY2009). A Mechanical Visit to Los Alamos will need to be made during a double maintenance day. Eric has come up with a task list for LA. A meeting is scheduled for Thursday 5 February 2009 around 10:00 AM to finalize FY 2009 TT visits. The Brewster and North Liberty foundations continue to degrade and will require urgent repairs in the near future at an approximate cost of $15K each. Foundation work has been placed on the funding wish list. MK dish panels that were damaged were replaced. The damaged panels will need to be repaired for spares. The warehouse has stocked remainder of Wheel assembly parts necessary to replace all remaining original wheel assemblies. We will continue in FY2010 with Maintenance visits for HN, FD and BR. AZ BEARINGS -- Four Bearings have been shipped to Rotek for repair. Only 1 of the four bearings was refurbishable. A second bearing inner race will be touched up and the bearing will be reassembled. This will give us a usable emergency spare but should not be considered for a scheduled replacement and should be labeled "emergency spare only" as soon as it arrives. A third bearing will need a completely new inner ring fabricated. A visit to witness assembly and acceptance of bearings is tentatively scheduled for February and tentative delivery of all three bearings is February- March. Older grease samples show that antennas 10, 20, are candidates for scheduled bearing changes. New grease samples of all VLA antennas have been taken and will be analyzed to determine the status of VLA AZ bearings as soon as possible to plan future bearing replacement. If older EVLA antennas have bad bearings they may be brought in to be updated along with a bearing change. Bolts will need to be ordered before a bearing change this year (possibly for three bearing changes). There is a 2 year minimum lead time for new and refurbished bearings from Rotek. An estimated three weeks in the AAB are required before a bearing change can occur. Parts from the bearings removed from antennas are needed for measuring and fitting of new parts and should be stored until they are scheduled to be shipped for repair. If an older Version PROJECTS: CONTROL BUILDING STAIRWAYS--- The Control Building Stairways are being replaced due to their rapid deterioration. The stairways will be replaced with an improved design conforming to ADA. The western stairway is complete. A new concrete landing will have to be poured at the base of the eastern stairway and the steps replaced. The eastern stairway barricaded to prevent its use. There is no urgency for this project since safety has declared that there is no need for this stairway as a means of emergency egress. Work on the eastern stairway will continue as the workload permits. No further progress. ST Croix MAINTENANCE VISIT--- A special visit to the VLBA St. Croix antenna to complete painting and replace AZ Wheel Assemblies (2ea), the Subreflector and the elevation bearing was completed in mid November 2008. It is evident that a follow up painting program should be initiated. Jon Thunborg will look into this. VLA ANTENNA FOUNDATION MOVEMENT--- A problem with north arm antenna foundation movement needs to be addressed. It appears that the two rearward station pillars have been slowly separating over the years at CN5, BN3 and BN5 with BN5 being the worst. They have separated far enough in about 33 years that 2 bolts (one on each reward pad) can no longer be used to secure the antenna pads to the foundation pillars. Markers have been set for taking measurements to try and see which pillars are actually moving and at what rate. The plates from BN5 have been removed for modification in the machine shop. No change was observed between loaded and unloaded measurements however more measurements will be taken throughout the year. Modification of the CN5 plates and BN5 are complete. They will be installed as soon as practical. GENERATOR REPAIRS--- Minor leaks were noticed at the engine rear seals and it is desirable to install a better fuel filtering system. A bearing on the generator unit also should be replacement as a PM. This work would cost around $15K and has been put on the funding wish list. POWER MONITOR--- Installation of the power monitoring equipment in the Hatch gear took place on 9/19/08. The power monitoring equipment will very useful in determining our power quality needs and will keep operations informed of power status at all times. Power monitoring on the internet is still pending but will be installed soon. This work should not require a power outage. HOT WATER LOOP. A project is submitted to install a hot water loop using Correlator waste heat: The difference between the summer load and winter load is mostly due to heating (at least 300kW). However, even during the coldest mornings the cooling tower is ventilating correlator waste heat into the atmosphere. We already use some of the heat in the Control Building, but by extending the hot water loop to other buildings, we may be able to reduce our power demand. The WIDAR correlator will have an even higher heat output to work with. This project mainly consists of burying a hot water loop and using heat exchangers similar to what many complexes of buildings use. Payback on this project could be as quick as 1 year. Bob Broilo will investigate and provide further information. ABOVE GROUND STORAGE TANK COMPLIANCE---Our Above Ground Storage (AST) facility is lacking in several areas according to an inspection done by the New Mexico Environment Department. An operation and maintenance plan and several other issues need to be addressed to comply with new Petroleum Storage Tank Bureau (PSTB) AST regulations. An inspection report was issued to NRAO citing non compliance of the fuel tanks in the following areas; Monthly Release Detection inspections, Spill and Overfill compliance, Corrosion Prevention, Financial Responsibility and Inadequate Normal and Emergency venting. All areas of non compliance have been corrected be the ES Division except Financial Responsibility which will be provided by Skip. 125vdc GENERATOR SUPPLY MODIFICATION. A safety switch and other related wiring changes to the VLA Standby Generator Battery supply will be installed in order to make servicing the batteries a safer operation and without interruption of the battery supply to the generator system controls. EVLA; Civil--- Correlator Room: The Air Conditioning system needs to be tied in to the CPCC for controlling a shutdown of air handlers during emergency shutdowns. Wiring is in place and ES division will provide support to the Software group. There was a 48vdc power supply failure which has been corrected but spare parts need to be ordered for this. A 48volt battery pm will be done this week. EVLA Antennas---The Antenna Group must complete mechanical overhauls of antennas to meet the retrofit schedule of a total of 23 antennas to the EVLA design in FY2009. A total of 20 S-band (2-4 GHz) feed horns will be fabricated in FY2009. The Ku-band (12-18 GHz) feed horns will also be fabricated in FY2009. A prototype insulating of the feed cone/vertex room will be installed in an EVLA antenna in an effort to improve temperature stability in the feed cone/vertex room. This will likely occur in the field. In the event remaining VLA antennas are shut down after the 22nd EVLA antenna is complete it would be desirable to remove power and complete some of the outfitting tasks in the field for some groups. SAFETY REPORT: The North Arm French Drain will need Confined Space signage has been installed. The problem with the dump concerning water standing seems to have been rainwater only so this is no longer considered a problem. Transporter noise test report is forthcoming. Hearing protection during transporter operations will be recommended but not required. Up-Coming training for site personal. Confined Space, Lockout-Tagout and Bloodborne Pathogens. This is required training. ANNOUNCEMENTS: ETK Training (Electronic Timekeeping) Electronic Timekeeping---Parallel testing is underway until March or soon after at which time we will go completely onto ETK. Please continue filling out ETK timecards and report any problems you encounter to MIS helpdesk. The NRAO Windows Computing Admins will be upgrading Microsoft Office 2003 to Office 2007 over the next 2 months. In order to reduce disruption to observatory operations, the upgrade will be performed one division at a time, concurrently with a training session provided by NRAO Computing. The current schedule shows Wednesday February 11th at 3:00pm EST, 1pm MST for Engineering Services. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: