APT - In The News

LONGMONT -- It lacked cotton candy and a Ferris wheel, but the sixth annual Advanced Packaging Technology open house on Thursday and Friday was every bit a carnival.

Unofficially founded in the late-1970s, APT conducts a fantastic range of product and package testing- from potato life expectancies to the encasements of laser-guided Hellfire air-to-surface missiles.

And to determine the durability of both products and their packaging, APT’s test labs at 1601 Dry Creek Drive include machinery named everything from the “Tilt Tester” to the “Monster Chamber”.

But the business, a StorageTek subsidiary, isn’t all about fun and games.

“Every morning trains loaded with fruits and vegetables leaves L.A.,” explained Steve Kajewski, APT’s engineering manager. Without proper packaging, the produce would bruise during the many stops en route to the Big Apple.

With 85 active clients, APT employs numerous testing methods to determine parameters such as a product’s tolerance for temperature, climate, altitude, shock and vibration. Consequently, the facility is more torture chamber that carnival for the objects under scrutiny and their travel wraps.

Machinery, for example, tests the impact of earthquakes and train wrecks.

Even alpine skis get put through the proverbial ringer. A machine holds them tight and then gradually increases the chattering speed.

“It’s worse than moguls,” Kajewski said. “My knees are getting tired just watching it.”

Another machine rams pallets of items as delicate as computer hard drives into a wall at 4 or 5 mph to simulate train car couplings, trucks hitting loading docks or even locked brake situations.

“But in real life, stuff gets banged up more than that,” Kajewski added, so the impact-testing machine can test for bumps and jars up to 13 mph.

Another machine can simulate the impact of a bullet on a ship’s hull. Down the aisle, a chamber can subject a test object to temperature changes up of down of 13-degrees Fahrenheit per minute.

Testing how packaging can protect potato chips from turning oatmeal flake-sized is one thing.

But cosmetic testing is just as pragmatic a concern, Mason explained. If improperly protected from hauling-related wear and tear, for example, branding on canned beverages can smudge or rub off. So, some testing applies directly to that kind of friction prevention.

APT also uses a refrigerated chamber to test the shelf-life of medical products. Kitty corner from that walk-in environment, a machine that looks like a bakery rake measures how a combination of environmental factors age and distress beer and its boxing

Fifteen onsite engineers conduct the testing from start to finish and that, Kajewski said, includes everything from hand-cutting the Styrofoam packing material to the billing report.

That APT maintains its own woodworking shop and a room with every packing material imaginable.

Yet, some of the more than 100 visitors that toured APT last week never knew the company existed—despite the 32,000 square-foot facility, Mason said.

To change that, APT hired its first dedicated sales and marketing staff person, Dave Thompson, five weeks ago—even though the company unofficially launched in 1978.

That’s when Kajewski began engineering better ways to insure safe travel for Storagetek’s delicate tape libraries and other computer-related products.

By 1992, increased demand from companies looking to outsource the work and a growing need for harder bedrock—to keep one test from influencing results in a nearby test—motivated APT to relocate to Longmont.

APT conducts tests from simple one-shot analysis to multiple-day, multi-system evaluations on satellite technology. But on customer or test is too little, Kajewski explained.

“When a customer gets 50 seeds in a package, he wants all of them to grow,” he explained.

For more information, visit www.storagetek.com.

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