SOLICITATION NOTICE
66 -- Notice of Intent to Award to Kinemetrics
- Notice Date
- 9/8/2012
- Notice Type
- Presolicitation
- NAICS
- 334519
— Other Measuring and Controlling Device Manufacturing
- Contracting Office
- USGS OAG SACRAMENTO ACQUISITION BR.MODOC HALL, CSUS3020 STATE UNIVERSITY DRIVE EASTSACRAMENTOCA95819-6027US
- ZIP Code
- 00000
- Solicitation Number
- G12PS00898
- Response Due
- 9/18/2012
- Archive Date
- 10/18/2012
- Point of Contact
- Zachary Buss
- E-Mail Address
-
zbuss@usgs.gov
(zbuss@usgs.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- The U.S. Geological Survey, Earthquake Science Center, intends to award of a non-competitive procurement to Kinemetrics for multi-channel, strong motion Rock Series Granite recorders. Equipment consisting of seven Kinemetrics Rock Series Granite recorders (Four 36-channel, three 24-channel) to monitor the performance of structures during seismic shaking. The Western Earthquake Hazards Team (WEHZ) requires this equipment to fulfill a contract between the Veterans Affairs (VA) and the WEHZ to install seismic recorders in VA hospitals that are in seismically high or very high zones. Since the 1960s the USGS has had an ongoing agreement with the Veterans Affairs (VA) to maintain and install strong motion instrumentation at their hospitals and facilities. Many of their hospitals are in seismically prone areas and indeed have suffered severe shaking from some of the major earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas over the last 30 years. They are required by law to instrument these facilities so that the ground motion that their buildings are subjected to is known. Many facilities have sensors already but most sites are not instrumented in a way that the actual building performance can be assessed during a major earthquake. The VA has a seismic hazard commission and they have recommended that their important hospitals in seismically high and very high zones be fully instrumented in order to properly assess the likelihood of structural damage during shaking from a major earthquake. Many of the areas where the VA has major hospital facilities are identified as having a significant probability of a M6.7 earthquake in the next 30 years. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Team in Menlo Park has contracted with the VA to provide this instrumentation, installation, and maintenance for an initial period of three years. In each building individual sensors are placed around the floors to determine the motion of each floor. Differencing the motion in each floor provides the strain in the columns holding the structure up. The sensors are then wired to a central recorder. Many of the buildings will require 24 or more single channel accelerometers. Each accelerometer is low-noise, low-power, and has stable characteristics over tens of years. The recorders (the subject of this purchase) need to be capable of sampling up to 36 channels simultaneously with a nominal 24 bit ADC. It needs to be very internet aware, and open source in order for us to integrate the current systems that we are working on. We are building an alarm system that will be installed in each building that monitors the amount of movement that building has undergone (assuming an earthquake has occurred) with respect to design values. The alarm system is an additional piece of software that uses the signals from the installed accelerometers. The Kinemetrics Rock series recorders offer features that are not available in any other product. The following is a list and an explanation of why each features or group of features is important. 1.The highest sample rate available on the Rock Series Granite recorder is 2000 samples per second (sps). This gives a bandwidth to 1000 Hz, which is important for detecting and locating damage in a building. For example if seismic waves travel at 3 km/s in the building then the waves travel 3m in a millisecond. That is about the distance between floors. To locate damage at a particular floor or between a floor would require sample rates at 1000 sps or greater. Only the Kinemetrics Rock system provides for the high sample rates without compromising sample rate selection in other data channels. 2.The Rock software that is the operating system for the recorders has numerous unique features that make the Kinemetrics system more flexible and useful in a situation where building performance is being monitored and alarms are being declared. Such as: a)Multiple data streams. This allows us to have multiple records from a single recorder at different sample rates and with different characteristics such as, i) A fail-safe, locally recorded, permanent record of a triggered strong motion data (e.g., 200 sps) ii) A ring buffer (e.g., 30 days) of continuous, high-sample rate data (e.g. 2000 sps), grabbed on-demand over the Internet (e.g., for structural research: potentially, one could locate the acoustic emissions from fractures in welds in the steel frame of the building) iii) A telemetered (e.g., Internet) continuous data stream to the regional seismic networks. iv) A telemetered (e.g., Internet) state-of-health data stream to the regional seismic networks v) Similar telemetered data streams to the USGS PI's for the VA project vi) Similar telemetered data streams to the on-site VA building engineering staff and VA management b) Synthetic data streams. For the VA project, we want the instrumentation to be able to generate real-time alerts if the building is shaken out-of-plumb during an earthquake. At a minimum, this will require real-time integration of velocity or acceleration to displacement. The Kinemetrics OASIS software has built-in modules that can generate a velocity data stream from an acceleration data stream, and a displacement data stream from a velocity data stream. These data streams can be used interchangeably with the sampled data streams (e.g., the A/D data from the accelerometers). The Kinemetrics Rock system allows us to add software which we write to the Rock system to add capabilities to the system. No other vendor has such capability. c) Customized and/or off-the-shelf The Kinemetrics Rock-based systems software, Rockhound, is user-programmable and extensible. Rockhound is based on the modern Java programming language, running on the Linux open-source operating system. Custom modules can be written in Java and integrated into the system. For example, ISTI has a module to integrate a Rocks system into an Earthworm seismic network. Custom transfer functions can be programmed to generate any data stream, which can then be used for triggering alarms, for example. For the VA project, we plan to develop a transfer function that will generate the (true/false) out-of-plumb signal for a building, which will cause the immediate notification of the VA building engineers that a structural failure has occurred. d) Multiple Rockhound systems can operate together. Modules are available to replicate the data streams from one Rockhound system to another. Each system can then independently process the data in real-time. For example, the data stream can be split off to a second Rockhound system that can drive a real-time status display in the building engineer's office, without affecting the other data streams being telemetered, for example, to the regional seismic networks. e) Secure data transmissions. The Department of Interior requires that computers be secure. Secure data transmission satisfies part of that requirement. Because Rockhound sits on top of Linux, numerous techniques are available to secure data transmissions. One other vendor currently offers FTP as the method for transferring data over the Internet, which is not a secure protocol. (Neither the user ID/password authentication transaction or the data transmission are encrypted.) f) Simplified maintenance: The Kinemetrics Rock-based systems can be managed using a standard web browser. g) The Kinemetrics Rock-based systems are very flexible, and can be configured for virtually any combination of data channels (either an actual ground motion signal or a synthetic signal) and data destinations. The Rock OS defines a protocol for retrieving data and state-of- health information remotely as well as a user interface. The NSMP is very familiar with the user interface and significant software was been written based on the Rock protocol to remotely and automatically retrieve SOH and data. We do not have the resources to rewrite this software to talk to another system. Other systems are not similar. This software is our own and cannot be modified by someone else. 3. The channel wiring system for these recorders is completely compatible with the Kinemetrics Episensor that we have about 1000 already procured. It is essential that these recorders work seamlessly with the other devices we already have in order to ensure complete compatibility and communication. The USGS Earthquake Science Center in Menlo Park has contracted with the VA to provide this instrumentation, installation, and maintenance. The project has been funded with a series of one year agreements, but has been ongoing since 2009. We have presently installed granite recorders in about 20 structures of which about 12 are VA hospitals; as well as the Factor Building at UCLA and the Federal Building in San Francisco. The government would incur undue hardship in cost and labor to learn a new system and maintain two different systems. Each vendor has a unique method for communicating with its equipment (browser or ftp, for example), retrieving data, formatting data, and handling state-of-health information. A substantial investment is made in the computer programs that handle all if these processes. We have made this investment with the Rock-series recorders and the government would incur undue hardship in cost and labor to learn another system and continue to maintain two systems. NO SOLICITATION OR REQUEST FOR QUOTE (RFQ) IS AVAILABLE FOR THIS PROCUREMENT. Notwithstanding, any firm that believes it is capable of meeting the USGS requirement as stated herein may submit a capability statement, proposal, or quotation, which shall be considered by the Agency (FAR 5.207(c)(16)(i)). All questions or comments regarding this procurement shall be addressed in writing to Zachary Buss, at zbuss@usgs.gov. This notice conforms to the requirements in place through FAC 2005-60, Effective 27 Aug 2012. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code for this procurement is 334519 OTHER MEASURING AND CONTROLLING DEVICE MANUFACTURING. SBA Size Standard is 500
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