Digital Savant: Go behind the scenes of 3M’s testing labs
When someone asks you, “Would you like to see a room that makes lightning?” the correct answer is “Yes.”
Lightning is ephemeral and such an offffffffffffer may not last. You can worry later whether it’s some sort of trap that will result in a “Goodfellas”-style mafia hit, delivered by electro cution.
Because lightning is fascinating and because the offffffffffffer was extended, I found myself on Wednesday morning wearing goggles inside a laboratory deep inside a very large building in northwest Austin waiting for the startling “pop!” of an electrical flashover.
Some background: In 1984, the very large, St. Paul, Minnesota-based company 3M sent a group of about 100 employees to Austin to start a new offiffice. That turned into a manufacturing plant on Research Boulevard that today measures more than 200,000
square feet. 3M also built an 11-building campus near RM 2222 and RM 620 that includes its Innovation Center, nine five-story buildings and more than 60 environments and chambers to test products.
Today, the company employs about 1,100 people here. Its Austin-based Electronics and Energy Business Group is the only one of 3M’s five major business groups headquartered outside of St. Paul.
A $32 billion company can afford to do things like build a laboratory the size of an auto-repair garage to test out terminations and splices for power lines, and give it enough self-generated electricity — from 3M’s power plant, not the city — to simulate lightning. That same company can afford to make a cold room for the sole purpose of stretching out pieces of tape and seeing how well that tape sticks to different surfaces.
Scale is something that comes to mind a lot on this campus, where it would be very easy to get lost without a guided tour. From the main Innovation Center entrance, a showroom for both consumer and industrial products the company makes, to the walkway leading to just one of the 11 buildings — in all, this campus is 500,000 square feet over 73 acres — everything about the place feels like a feat of large-scale engineering and experimentation. It adds to this impression that there are industrial eye wash stations lined on the walls even in areas that are just office cubicles.
But we’re here to see lightning, made by people in a lab, harnessed safely and put to good use. Past a stretch of offices, in through a narrow control room full of bulky equipment with gigantic, colorful knobs and buttons, amid signs that warn, “HIGH VOLTAGE IN USE,” and, in case you didn’t get it, “DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE,” we go.
Into a room with enormous pieces of equipment that wouldn’t be out of place in a black-andwhite sci-fi movie, something with cosmic rays and a reanimated monster, all jutting rings and intimidating coils.
Sean Davis, a 3M technologist, couldn’t be further from a mad scientist, but he knows the room inside and out and appears to take pride in the large lab’s unique characteristics.
“No other high-voltage lab with this capability in the world is on the fourth floor or above ground,” Davis said, due to the weight of the equipment and the special requirements needed for the room. Everything around the testing lab — floor, ceiling, walls, windows, doors — is grounded and shielded, protecting the rest of the building from what happens here. Noise-dampening panels line the walls to keep noise from blaring out.
Testing, it turns out, isn’t just a good idea; it’s necessary for the electronics products 3M sells. They must be certified to exacting standards (“IEEE” is just one set of engineering standards) and recertified when specifications change. Sometimes, Davis said, the lab is called upon by clients to test out, say, the splices that can connect together power lines in certain conditions. For instance, he said, a company recently wanted to know if splices that would be used on a flood plain could endure the pressure of being underwater within PVC pipes. Tanks were used to simulate that, while the lightning lab could then be used to test the equipment afterward. Some standards testing takes months, Davis said. The lightning lab is used daily.
And then things get electrical. I don’t pretend to have an understanding of how much juice 1,000 volts, a kilovolt or KV, means in terms of charging my phone or keeping the lights on my car going or how fatal getting too close to it might be. I know that 1 KV is a lot — and an impulse generator in the lab can generate 800 KV, or 800,000 volts. That requires a cir- cuit to charge that up, as well as a voltage divider, Davis says, “to step it down so we can control it and measure it.”
It takes about 30 seconds to charge up the impulse generator each time to today’s testing voltage of 300 KV, connected to an electrical termination that looks like a jutting needle attached to a gas station hose. Inside the control room, behind the grounded door and safely shielded windows, we watch. The “ding, dong!” of a doorbell sounds to warn when the moment is here. And then: “pop!” A flash, gone in just a moment. The air has been burned, or rather ionized. Flashover has occurred, creating a plasma spark. It’s a modest spectacle, really just a bright dot of light in the air, but the loud report, like the bang of a small gun, tells you all you need to know about its power.
Five times we cycle through. Buzz. Ding-dong! Pop! And a flash.
And then it’s over and the lab is safe for entry again. It’s just a large space where mankind has miraculously triumphed over lightning without death or injury.
A few minutes later, leaving the lightning lab behind, we visit the cold room, which is exactly what it sounds like. A room no larger than a modest restaurant freezer, with some work benches and drawers.
It’s used exclusively to test the kind of black vinyl electrical tape that 3M invented.
Between two grips, tape is tested at a temperature of two degrees below zero. Does it stay sticky on metal at that temperature? What happens when you stretch it out?
Tony Daniel, a technician who works the computer outside that controls the room, wears a heavy parka and hood. The workers here have a sense of humor about the unglamorous world of testing tape in subfreezing temperatures. A green model of a Dallas Stars Zamboni is nearby. On the wall is a tropical painting, close to matching the beach scene on the computer.
Does imagining the tropics keep a person warm in cold rooms that can go down to 40 degrees below zero? Can someone really conquer mind over cold with the power of warm thoughts?
“Nope,” Daniel says helpfully as he readjusts a length of Super 88 black tape for testing.