GPS Specialty Doors

GPS Specialty Doors

REVERBATION CHAMBER DOOR

Concrete Filled Door – 225ft. wide, 63ft. high, 1.5ft. thick, weighing 168 tons. Designed for seismic loading zone 4 with a 1.5 importance factor. Aerospace Company - Redondo Beach, California

Reverberation chambers are used to simulate the shock and vibration loads imposed on space vehicle payloads during lift-off. The doors to these chambers, often as tall as a commercial aircraft hangar door, require special design, fabrication and installation considerations.

The door shown to the left laps the header, sill and jambs by one foot in order to operate acoustic mechanical seals. The floor pit across the opening is closed by draw bridges that operate pneumatically when the door is fully open, allowing a passageway for the transfer dollie carrying the satellite to be positioned in it's test stand location. Interior DB levels can exceed 151!

BLAST DOORS and BLAST DEFLECTORS

GPS has designed, manufactured and installed a wide range of blast doors and related specialty projects. Projects include swinging blast doors for munitions storage facilities (Vandenburg AFB pictured above), acoustic blast doors for C-5 engine test cells (Travis AFB), sliding acoustic blast doors for engine manufacturing facilities (GE China), and sliding blast doors for aircraft shelters (Peace Vector, Egypt).

Shown below is a rail car designed and fabricated especially for use as a moveable base for a jet engine blast deflector. The bases are designed to prevent overturning of the deflector due to loads imposed by the run up of jet engines.

Aircraft Aperture Doors

The T-Tail and extra large aircraft currently in service around the world require a unique solution to maintenance hangar design. These aircraft require a maximum height capacity to fit all the aircraft within the hangar. This requirement creates a very large building envelope, and this drives the price. But what if you do not need to fit the entire aircraft into the hangar? What if the tallest part of the aircraft could be left outside? This allows for a much smaller hangar, which equates to less expensive construction and operation of the facility.

C-17 Aperture Door, Seal Deflated

An aperture door system is required to seal the hangar from weather and unwanted visitors. The apertures can be built within the main doors, or added on as a seperate door mounted to the face of the main doors. The aperture seals can be fixed foam or can be inflatable. Aperture doors can be configured for one specific aircraft alignment, or can be movable vertically and horiontally to accomodate many aircraft positions. Multiple doors can be utilized to accomodate several different aircraft types within one hangar.

GPS Specialty Doors has installed many Aircraft Aperture Door systems.

Interior View - Main Door C-5 Aperture with Seals partially inflated, Add-on C017 Aperture prior to seals being installed