There is a new camera room nestled in the bunker beneath Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Outdoor Firing Facility (OFF) "table" where explosives are tested. The camera room was a grassroots effort by the camera team to create efficiencies by modernizing operations and creating valuable hands-on training space.
"We expect we'll save between half a day to two days on shot setup," said Shawn Van Tol, lead camera operator at the Contained Firing Facility. OFF experiments, called "shots," typically take between one to two weeks to set up, execute, recover and clean up. Camera operators are responsible for capturing shot images that include the micro-moments of an experiment when metal liquefies and disintegrates (known as a change of state).
Having a dedicated camera room is new for the team. Previously, camera operators would test out their plans and equipment on the OFF table itself. "That could get tricky if another shot was in progress or another team needed the space, or even if the weather was bad," said lead camera operator Cliff Peaslee.
Most training happened on the job in the context of the experiment, which limited opportunities for trainees to learn alternate or outlier use cases, or to simply test out the equipment without schedule pressures. Camera equipment was stored throughout the building.
The camera operators proposed that they could improve efficiency if key imaging and training activities could happen in parallel with, rather than as part of, other bunker activities.
The first order of business was to find space. On their way to the nook that houses the OFF's high-speed cameras, the team would pass through a storage space that held excess legacy equipment and unused items. It was perfect.
With the space chosen, they next had to design the room layout. "We thought carefully about how camera operators actually go about their day," said Jerry Cradick, imaging explosives experiment diagnostic lead. "We wanted everyone to be able to easily get to whatever they needed to do their jobs, and also be able to walk around to team up or do training."
The team settled on a flexible, galley-style design with tables along the walls. They envisioned enough surface area to lay out more than 40 feet of laser-sighted image paths and to test diagnostic configurations and equipment before moving operations up to the OFF table. When the full surface area was not needed, the space could easily be divided into as many as eight individual workstations.
They kept redesign costs low by scouring Site 300 and the Second Time Around store, finding a butcher block top and storage cabinet to create workstations with storage underneath. They also acquired several high-quality, high speed imaging cameras from other programs that no longer had the need for them.
"This type of initiative by our extremely dedicated team to not only identify but also to take ownership of and drive these types of projects is what really moves the needle to have long-term, positive impacts for firing operations and the hydrotest program," said Anthony Regalado, explosives experiment fielding supervisor. "What was once unused and 'dead' space can now be utilized to set up and test new and unique diagnostics configurations and equipment to advance our understanding, training and overall readiness to field experiments, and improve our data quality and quantity."
-- Paula Duarte
