Tohono O’odham unit partly owns Tucson company
By Dan Sorenson
ARIZONA DAILY STAR December 6, 2009
Water-soluble ceramic: It’s hard as rock, dissolves in water, and hopefully turns into money.
When you look up “counterintuitive,” there should be a picture of Robert Doucette, production manager of Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing, making one of the company’s ceramic forms — known as a mandrel in the tool and die business — disappear in a gentle stream from a garden hose.
These water-soluble ceramics, which can be turned into a drain-safe soup, are the backbone of this local company’s business.
“It’s virtually food grade; you can wash it down the drain,” says ACM president Steve Turcotte, watching the demonstration on ACM’s loading dock in the San Xavier Development Authority’s Hi:kdañ Business Park.
Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing makes a variety of products, mainly for aerospace manufacturing — from parts for the latest superliners and tiny unmanned aircraft to reverse- engineered ductwork for 40-year-old jet fighters and other “legacy” aircraft parts.
The company was founded in 2001 as a joint venture between Advanced Ceramics Research, a materials developer and drone maker started in 1989 by two University of Arizona engineers, and the San Xavier Development Authority.
After Advanced Ceramics Research was acquired in June by defense giant BAE Systems Inc. in a $14.7 million stock deal, Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing was sold to the San Xavier Development Authority, an arm of the Tohono O’odham Nation, and founders Anthony Mulligan and Mark Angier.
Making cleaner parts
The bulk of ACM’s ceramics work is for aircraft —from the latest enormous super jetliners and small UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to decades-old jet fighters and helicopters.
Carl Aune, sales and marketing manager, shows a plaster form for an F-15 part, possibly a piece of ductwork. The plane was designed in the early 1 970 s.
Making new parts the old way, using plaster forms, is troublesome. The plaster has to be destroyed after the duct is formed over it. That can leave debris inside and busting out the cast from the compound curves of a complex part is not only difficult, but can damage the part.
A water-soluble ceramic mandrel, however, can be cleanly and safely dissolved with water.
ACM’s environmentally friendly ceramic mandrels are no small thing, especially near Tucson International Airport, atop an aquifer that was contaminated with carcinogenic industrial solvents used by the aircraft industry nearby.
The process is no small thing for the industry, either. Making aircraft parts, and the forms used to make such parts, requires precision and reliability.
Turcotte and Aune say they hope to do more work for modern aircraft, including Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner.
That may include helping to make thousands of holes in the Dreamliner. One of their products getting interest is a ceramic drill bit that can stand up to the tough carbon fiber used in the Dreamliner and most of the latest generation of aircraft.
Turcotte says the “sandwich” of carbon fiber, aluminum and titanium used to make the fuselage of the Dreamliner and other new aircraft is so tough that it can require drill-bit changes on each of the hundreds of thousands of holes that have to be drilled in the material on a large plane. That’s expensive and time consuming. Turcotte says ACM’s ceramic drill bit is up to the task.
And there is work on less glamorous, but equally important, aircraft. ACM is making ceramic mandrels for air ducts on the newest version of the U.S. Marine Corps CH-53 Heavy-Lift helicopter.
It also makes Fiberglas body parts for UAVs made by BAE Systems.
As with most aerospace manufacturing or repair operations, there is a fundamental, but unspoken, principle. Turcotte, a former Navy flier, says if anybody were to put it on a workplace plaque it would read something like: “Let us try our best to break things here and now — on the ground.”
Every aircraft part has its own 24/7 reality show. Everything that happens to it is all on record in mind-numbing detail, a pile of paperwork that follows each aircraft and each of its parts from manufacture to the crusher.
Branching out with R&D
Not everything ACM does involves aircraft, or even ceramics. It sells jar mills — much like rock tumblers used in lapidary work — that continuously rotate plastic jars on horizontal rollers to polish parts inside the ja rs.
Turcotte says ACM today is split about half and half between research and production. And while the bulk of the company’s work is aerospace related, it occasionally veers off into new territory, such as a “tree spike” that gets its energy from its host tree (or saguaro) that could be used to power microcircuits to keep an eye on what’s going on nearby, or just report on the tree’s health.
The project was originally funded by the National Science Foundation and has continued funding from Homeland Security, Aune said. Besides keeping an eye on the border, the tree spike could even be adapted for use in preventing saguaro cactus poaching, with tree-powered radiofrequency identification tags set to report any movements to authorities, Turcotte said.
Ideas and work that come out of the research and development section, headed up by Zachary Wing, ACM science and technology director, is likely where the company’s future lies, says Turcotte.
Wing says ceramics research has some exciting potential, such as transparency. He shows a piece of a special ceramic material that is translucent. Combining ceramic toughness — it is used in armor, after all — with transparency would have obvious defense applications.
Advanced materials are where it’s at and where it’s going in aerospace, Turcotte says.
“The Boeing 787 (Dreamliner) is over 50 percent composite material,” says Turcotte. “The 777 (Boeing’s last airliner) was only 12 percent.”
Contact reporter Dan Sorenson at 5734185 or dsorenson@azstarnet.com
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ROCK HARD, DISSOLVES IN WATER
PHOTOS BY JILL TORRANCE / ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Robert Doucette, production manager, pulls water-soluble ceramic mandrels, or forms, from a drying oven at Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing. The company makes a variety of products, mainly for aerospace manufacturing.
A three-dimensional experimental compression is measured by a lab technician in the wet lab at Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing.
Steve Turcotte
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