Customer Stories - Lansmont Corporation

Movers & Shakers
Customers in the know.
Prehistoric
Road Trip!
By Dale Root
Principle Researcher / Software Development Manager
Leonardo is a unique specimen- a dinosaur that’s more than
just a pile of bones! Fossilized skin still covers most of his body.
After his death, the body dried out and mummified, and then
slowly over time the mummy fossilized. For a 77 million year old
relic, Leonardo has survived almost intact. Over the last year,
Lansmont had the opportunity to work with the Leonardo
Project alongside paleontologists, packaging pros Sealed Air
and test design experts ISTA. The Leonardo Project is setup
like CSI (crime scene investigation) for the dinosaur world.
Paleontologists are busy reconstructing how he lived, what he
ate, his age, cause of death, etc. They even wanted to see inside
his body with hopes that impressions of soft tissue might have
survived. Clearly they couldn’t destroy the fossil by chipping
away the skin to get inside. They needed a “super” scanner
that was large enough to accommodate the stone block, and
powerful enough to see through it. A national search led to a
NASA facility near Houston, Texas. Think of the possibilities –
a firsthand look inside a real dinosaur.
The Journey
Leonardo would need to journey from his
home in northern Montana to south Texas.
How do you safely move a big, heavy, one
of a kind, irreplaceable object - 2098 miles
- and guarantee that it doesn’t get damaged?
Lansmont followed the transport packaging
fundamentals: measure the environment, design
and test your protection system and monitor its
performance during shipment.
What lies ahead?
Before protection for a trip like this can be designed, you
need to understand the vibration and dynamic inputs that
can occur. Once identified, then a system can be engineered
to mitigate the effects. To assess the transportation severity
conditions, a “dry run” shipment was instrumented with
Lansmont SAVER X series field data recorders.
The exact vehicle and driver that would ultimately transport
Leonardo were pressed into service hauling a “simulated
load” in order to quantify the vehicle dynamics.
How can you utilize the power
of Lansmont instruments?
Find out at Lansmont.com
Test Equipment | Instruments | Support Services 17 Mandeville Court, Monterey, California | 93940 | 831.655.6600 | lansmont.com

3x90 mounted and ready to monitor trip to Houston.
Putting knowledge to the test
Data from the “dry run” was pored over, pondered, and
analyzed, ultimately culminating in a test specification and
design goal which Armstrong’s team could use to develop
the protection system. When it came time to make the trip
for real, Lansmont monitored both the truck and the crate in
which Leonardo rode. The instruments could feel how the
truck moved, and how Leonardo responded to that input. This
allowed us to verify that vehicle dynamics had not changed
since the “dry run” and to ensure continuity with the original
design goal. It also allowed us to observe the performance of
the protection system in action.
SaverXware has been used to produce 3D tours of the
spatially aware data recorded during the trip for display with
Google Earth. If you would like to explore the trip and data:
Go to www.Lansmont.com for instructions on setting up
Google Earth to view actual data from the trip.
The Leonardo Project has been chronicled in a new Discovery
Channel documentary titled Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy
which aired September 14th, 2008.
Lansmont Corporation is the world’s leading provider of state-
of-the-art measurement, testing and monitoring equipment,
software, education, and analytical services. Product and pack-
aging engineers around the world rely on Lansmont equipment
to discover the limits and eliminate the unknowns in transport
and in-use environments. Successful companies trust Lansmont
tools and experience to help them design stronger, more durable
products capable of surviving the rigors of real world use, and
delivering them safely in minimal, but effective packaging.
Significant Vibration Events
Lansmont SaverXware used the spatially aware data, recorded by the
Lansmont instruments, to generate a 3D Google Earth view of the trip.
” The instruments
could feel how the
truck moved, and
how Leonardo
responded to that
input . . . and allowed
us to observe the
performance of the
protection system
in action. ”
Test Equipment | Instruments | Support Services 17 Mandeville Court, Monterey, California | 93940 | 831.655.6600 | lansmont.com