APT - In The News

LONGMONT - Shaken and stirred. And frozen and smashed and baked. Storage Tek's Advanced Packaging Technology laboratory in Longmont does all of the above, and more, on a daily basis. And though there are no James Bond-types around testing martinis, there is plenty of Coors beer. Coors is one of the APT's biggest clients, testing their beers packaging on a regular basis. With nearly $5million invested in more than 30,000 square feet, the APT facility is one of the largest labs of its kind in the country. "Anybody that builds anything or ships anything could be our customers," said Steve Kajewski, manager of APT's environmental test lab. "We can simulate any condition on Earth, " Kajewski said, including hurricanes, the South Pole, Death Valley in the summer and 200 feet beneath the sea. The lab also can simulate conditions in outer space. The APT lab is divided into two sections, dynamic testing and environmental testing. In the dynamic lab, a variety of vibration TABLEs, shock TABLEs or different size and capacity and even an earthquake-simulation machine are used to test all kinds of objects. The effects of vibrations from a truck or train, the impact of being dropped or the feeling of being near ground zero during an earthquake are simulated on the various objects. The data is collected and examined, and the manufacturer is informed of the results. "What my challenge is - it's not to break something," said Peter Lewis, a packaging engineer in the environmental test lab. But things, of course, do break, which is the whole idea. Lewis said a company's packaging can lead to money wasted because of damaged product, whether that product is beer or hard drives. "What we're doing (during testing) is we're monitoring," Lewis said. "We're trying to find out what's going on on the inside of the product or on the inside of the package." He said companies that don't employ a packaging engineer typically will incure packaging and distribution costs 25 percent higher than a company that does have and engineer on staff. "By adding a few dollars to a product, you can eliminate a huge amount of dollars in packaging," Lewis said. More monitoring is being done in the environmental lab, where about 50 chambers have products placed into them for days of even weeks at a time. On a recent afternoon, pre-packaged cookies were being placed into one chamber to find out if their packaging would keep them fresh through wide variances in temperatures. "If you're steaming into a high-humidity area like Puerto Rico, we can simulate that," Kajewski said. Another example, Lewis said, would be a fighter plane sitting on the tarmac in Phoenix in the summer. The ground temperature under the desert sun would approach one extreme. When the jet takes off, it reaches altitude in a matter of seconds, where it might be flying at 50,000 feet with an air temperature of 50 below zero. The APT's environmental lab can simulate those condition. One of the chambers is big enough to hold a rocket. Kajewski said about 80 percent of the testing conducted at the lab is on Storage Tek products, while the rest is business from outside clients. In addition to Coors, Maxtor, Seagate, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Valley Lab, and Flextronics have all used APT. James Bond hasn't been to the lab, but there has been some undercover activity there. Companies that supply NASA and the military such as Boeing have used the lab to test certain pieces of machinery. Storage Tek will cordon off a test area, keeping a piece of equipment from prying eyes if it is of a particularly sensitive nature. Kajewski said pieces tested at APT have been placed aboard the Mir space station, as well as the international space station.

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