Publications

We conducted a study of the time and resources that would be required for Sandia National Laboratories to once again perform nuclear weapons effects experiments of the sort that it did in the past. The study is predicated on the assumptions that if underground nuclear weapons effects testing (UG/NWET) is ever resumed, (1) a brief series of tests (i.e., 2-3) would be done, and (2) all required resources other than those specific to SNL experiments would be provided by others. The questions that we sought to answer were: (1) What experiments would SNL want to do and why? (2) How much would they cost? (3) How long would they take to field? To answer these questions, we convened panels of subject matter experts first to identify five experiments representative of those that SNL has done in the past, and then to determine the costs and timelines to design, fabricate and field each of them. We found that it would cost $76M to $84M to do all five experiments, including 164 to 174 FTEs to conduct all five experiments in a single test. Planning and expenditures for some of the experiments needed to start as early as 5.5 years prior to zero-day, and some work would continue up to 2 years beyond the event. Using experienced personnel as mentors, SNL could probably field such experiments within the next five years. However, beyond that time frame, loss of personnel would place us in the position of essentially starting over.

The purpose of this review was to provide insights and information to Sandia National Laboratories' (SNL) Education Council on the state of technical education and training at SNL in order to address the concern that a change in philosophy surrounding education had occurred. To accomplish this, the status of current and past technical training and education programs were compared, and significant changes at SNL were assessed for their impact on education and training. Major changes in education and training are in the advertisement of course offerings, the course delivery methods, and the funding mechanisms for student and instructor time as well as course costs. The significant changes in SNL which influenced technical training and education are the considerable increase in mandatory or compliance training, a fundamental shift in SNL's management structure from an institutional structure to a more business-like, project-budgeted structure, and the change in SNL's mission at the end of the Cold War. These changes contributed to less time for technical training, reduction of training funds, elimination of some training, and a Service Center approach to paying for training. Most importantly, the overall combined effect has resulted in a shift from a strategic to a tactical training approach. The Corporate Training Department (CTD) has maneuvered to accommodate these changes and keep abreast of constantly changing needs.

Cost or performance targets for new bit technologies can be established with the aid of a drilling cost model. In this paper the authors make simplifying assumptions in a detailed drilling cost model that reduce the comparison of two technologies to a linear function of relative cost and performance parameters. This simple model, or analysis tool, is not intended to provide absolute well cost but is intended to compare the relative costs of different methods or technologies to accomplish the same drilling task. Comparing the simplified model to the detailed well cost model shows that the simple linear cost model provides a very efficient tool for screening certain new drilling methods, techniques, and technologies based on economic value. This tool can be used to divide the space defined by the set of parameters: bit cost, bit life, rate of penetration, and operational cost into two areas with a linear boundary. The set of all the operating points in one area will result in an economic advantage in drilling the well with the new technology, while any set of operating points in the other area indicates that any economic advantage is either questionable or does not exist. In addition, examining the model results can develop insights into the economics associated with bit performance, life, and cost. This paper includes development of the model, examples of employing the model to develop should cost or should perform goals for new bit technologies, a discussion of the economic insights in terms of bit cost and performance, and an illustration of the consequences when the basic assumptions are violated.

This paper discusses criteria for selecting analytical support tools for manufacturing engineering in the early phases of product development, and the lessons learned at Sandia National Laboratories in selecting and applying these tools. The IPPD (Integrated Product and Process Design) process requires manufacturing process developers to be involved earlier than ever before in product development. Operating in an IPPD environment, Sandia`s manufacturing engineers were required to develop early estimates of the cost and performance of manufacturing plans. In early pre-production, there are very little actual data on manufacturing processes and almost no detailed data on the performance of various manufacturing process steps. The manufacturing engineer needs the capability to analyze various manufacturing process flows over a large set of assumptions involving capacity, resource requirements (equipment, labor, material, utilities,...), yields, product designs, etc. If the manufacturing process involves many process steps, or if there are multiple products in a single manufacturing area that share resources, or there are multiple part starts resulting in merged flow for final assembly, then this analysis capability must somehow be mechanized. This situation led them to look to modeling and simulation tools for a solution. Example analyses of manufacturing issues for two product sets in the early phases of product development are presented.