Industry Recon

SprayCool will provide liquid-cooled enclosures that the Marine Corps will use in the command variant of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), company officials said.

The vehicle’s command variant uses high-end, commercial-grade embedded electronics from GE Fanuc that are housed in SprayCool’s enclosures. A core component of the EFV’s command-and-control architecture will be SprayCool’s multiprocessor unit (MPU).

The commercial boards used in the MPU feature five servers, a switch, an input/output board and two expansion cards. The SprayCool MPUs are rugged, sealed enclosures that provide protection for commercial boards and meet the temperature, vibration and electromagnetic interference requirements in Mil-Std 810F and 461.

SprayCool’s units will be used in the second phase of system development and demonstration of the prototype vehicle, company officials said. The vehicle will undergo operational assessment testing in 2011 and is tentatively slated for low-rate initial production in fiscal 2012. The Marines plan to use it for inland combat operations.

Optical platform

Nortel’s Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 is the first 40G optical platform to earn a place on the Joint Interoperability Testing Command’s Approved Products List, company officials said.

As a result of the certification, Nortel’s OME 6500 optical networking platform can be deployed in the Defense Department’s mission-critical networks, the officials said. The product can increase network capacity fourfold, to 40 gigabits/sec per wavelength.

The testing processes for JITC certification are among the most rigorous in the industry, Nortel officials said. JITC conducted the interoperability testing at the Global Information Grid Network Facility at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

The OME 6500 is a packet-optical convergence platform that enables efficient aggregation, transport, switching and management of network traffic.

It can converge several network layers so that agencies can support circuit-based time domain multiplexing private lines, optical services, packet transport and transparent wavelength services on a single platform. Such network streamlining can substantially reduce infrastructure costs, company officials said.

Friend-or-foe sensors

BAE Systems won a $13 million contract modification from the Naval Air Systems Command to furnish 500 friend-or-foe digital transponders to the Navy and Army, company officials said.

The AN/APX-118 common transponder identifies aircraft and naval vessels as friendly forces by responding to queries from ground-based and airborne identification systems. The AN/APX-118 replaces outdated transponders with digital technology.

The purpose of the transponders is to provide positive identification of friendly aircraft and ships. Those that do not respond as friendly are deemed potential threats.

The Navy and Army use the common transponder on a variety of aircraft and naval vessels, including submarines, surface ships, fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.

BAE Systems has provided as many as 4,000 AN/APX-118 common transponders to the Navy and Army under the Navair contract since 1999, company officials said.

Towed decoys

Raytheon won a $19.8 million contract from the Air Force’s Warner Robins Air Logistics Center to continue production of its ALE-50 towed decoys.

The agreement calls for Raytheon to deliver 807 decoys, which help aircraft survive in combat by acting as preferred targets for enemy missiles, company officials said. The Air Force uses them to enhance the survivability of its F-16, B-1B and F/A-18 aircraft.

Raytheon’s Space and Airborne Systems will produce the towed decoys at its Tactical Airborne Systems facility in Goleta, Calif.