Your Mission Should you Choose To Accept It
Location: Greenville, TXThe Mission:
The customer had a number of problems they were dealing with. A cantilever roof structure that allowed extensive roof movement in windy conditions. This had caused some doors to literally fall out, creating a huge safety concern. They had a series of 10 tail doors that were nothing more than modified garage doors and prone to frequent breakage. The tail doors also had to be in place in order for the main doors to operate, if this step was forgotten the doors could fall out!, again creating a huge safety risk.
The old main doors were manually operated and difficult for employees to push and were not insulated, which caused summer temperatures inside the hangar to soar. This was causing a loss of productivity and a great expense trying to keep some of the equipment cool.
Mission Accepted!
The first step was to replace the corroded bottom track with new rails and proper drainage to minimize future corrosion.
Next was to build a new door system to address the challenges. Temperature control was easy enough – we utilized an R-16.3 thermally broken cladding, which was not only effective but offered a clean look and protected the insulation from degradation.
Motor operate the door system, but due to the layout and all of the tail doors, conventional power supplies were not feasible. So we designed a solar powered motor system for each door. Each door has its own solar panel array, battery bank, charge controller system. When fully charged each door has enough reserve power to operate for months even with complete overcast conditions.
Now to the safety issues.
We utilized a captured hardware system that prevents the door from falling regardless of roof movement. Next we needed to eliminate the human error factor, so we designed a bridging top hardware system that allows the doors to travel across the tail door openings automatically at any time regardless of the tail door being open or closed. Next we replaced the old tail doors with one-piece hydraulic units that are operable independent of the main door system.
The Result: safety issues eliminated, operational issues eliminated, uncomfortable working conditions eliminated.
The owner reported that with the new door system installed the space remained comfortable in the middle of summer just from the overflow of the AC units inside the aircraft. And on the coldest days employees were wearing shorts in the hangars.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
