Small Business/SBIR

Shuttle Technology Reduces Manufacturing Defects

BY COMMERCIALIZING AN ENVIRONMENTAL fallout monitor originally designed to protect Space Shuttle payloads from contamination, NASA's technology transfer program is helping a Florida company provide a means for manufacturers to reduce costs and the number of defects in the manufacturing process. Technical Applications Unlimited (TAU), Inc., Cape Canaveral, Florida, is marketing the TAU-N100A, an economical contamination monitoring alternative for applications involving clean rooms, semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceutical production, spacecraft processing, food processing, heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) performance assessment and area motion/activity detection. The company, a member of the Florida/NASA Business Incubation Center, received a patent license from NASA at Kennedy Space Center for the Particle Fallout/Activity Sensor, now called the Real Time Optical Fallout Monitor (OFM).

"NASA has made it possible for TAU to get off the ground with a high-technology product that would have taken years and many more resources than a typical small business start-up company can make available," company president John Horan said. "We feel like TAU will be able to compete with the instrumentation industry leaders as a result of this boost from NASA."

TAU's research shows approximately 68,000 clean room facilities in the United States. Horan said he sees a large potential market with mounting concern over the possible hazards of airborne microparticles present in our ordinary living and working environments.

The OFM is a portable, optoelectronic instrument that uses a light-scattering technique to measure the accumulation of particles. It is compact, measuring 17.5 by 15.5 by 14.5 centimeters, and weighs only 1.5 kilograms. The monitor detects a single particle as small as 10 microns. Fallout accumulation measurements can be displayed on the front panel and/or downloaded for remote monitoring or analysis in real time.

The OFM technology has been improved during the commercialization process. TAU introduced temperature compensation circuitry and electromagnetic interference shielding, which improves the sensitivity and stability of the instrument.

TAU has sold OFMs to two major companies to date, and several other companies have expressed interest. A leading computer chip manufacturer purchased units to detect environmental contamination during production to reduce the number of defective chips, and a major aerospace/defense contractor has acquired units to monitor cleanliness during the integration of its next payload with the Titan IV rocket.

Major manufacturers, including a dominant California biopharmaceutical maker, are evaluating the OFM as an aid to assess cleanliness in manufacturing and processing environments, ultimately reducing defects caused by environmental contaminants. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has expressed interest in the OFM to help detect environmental fallout in various experimental nuclear processes.

NASA developed the OFM to accurately detect and monitor the accumulation of potentially damaging environmental contamination (such as dust, fibers or condensing vapor) on sensitive payload components in real time. The OFM eliminates both the need for laboratory technicians to process witness plate samples and the miscellaneous labor to collect and transport the samples and generate the laboratory reports. The OFM lowers the cost of the capital equipment necessary to provide the particle fallout contamination monitoring function for up to approximately 20 monitoring sites.

The total quality of facility services is improved by the OFM's ability to identify and react to contamination as it is occurring. This results in lower costs because of the possibility of quickly mitigating potential contamination and increasing the reliability of the manufacturing result.

Time-tagged data available from the OFM provide the ability to associate specific fallout events with the time of occurrence for analytical, substantiation or certification purposes. The OFM eliminates the need to manually count and characterize particles; thus it improves the reliability of contamination measurements that may be caused by the tedious and subjective nature of the analysis process.

For more information, contact Tom Gould at Kennedy Space Center.
Call: 407/867-6238, Fax: 407/867-2050, E-mail: Thomas.Gould-1@kmail.ksc.nasa.gov
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The TAU-N100A is the ultimate instrument for cost-effective, real-time, qualitative fallout analysis for a number of commercial applications.