[Escoordminutes] ES Coordination minutes- Feb 3

[Lew Serna]

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: <http://listmgr.nrao.edu/pipermail/escoordminutes/attachments/20090204/d843ddd8/attachment.html>