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ST Profile: Massa Products Corp.

Massa LeadsBy 'Doing the Impossible'Not Just a 'Transducer House,' Massa Projects Embrace theElectro-A coustic Gamut from Whale-Watching to Bowling."

Production Engineering KeyOne of the turning points in Frank

By David M. GrahamEditor

Hingham, Massachusetts-DonMassa characterizes his Massa Pro­

ducts Corporation as a "midget amongthe giants" of transducer houses. The70,000-square-foot plant, unobtrusiveeven in this small New England coas­tal town, might pale in the shadowsof the major sonar transducer manu­facturing giants. But Don Massaholds a few not-so-secret weaponsthat take the company well out of the"loft operation" category and un­deniably entrenching it in a leadposition.

One of them is his father, FrankMassa, the recog"nized pioneer ofelectro-acoustics.

The two Massas drive a taut shipthat is a combination of new, ener­getic technology leadership and old,long-line practices. Now in its 41styear, Massa Products prides itself onmaking products no other firm hasbeen able to do.

"Our place in the market is to dothe difficult and the impossible; thingsnobody else has done or can do. We

.do it be being ingenious," Don Massasays. The company still has over 100active patents in electro-acoustics.

Company history goes well beyondthe 1945 beginnings as Massa Labor­atories in Cleveland, Ohio. The elderMassa, who is now chairman of theboard in this still-family-held entity,began in 1928 as a new graduate ofMassachusetts Institute of Technol­

ogy in electrical engineering, devel­oping loudspeakers, microphones andphonograph pickups for the VictorTalking Machine Company-fore­runner to RCA- Victor. Frank Massa

Unobtrusive "midget," Massa plant nestled in Hingham covers 70,000 square feet.

also developed new test equipment ment hydrophone that became thefor making electro-acoustic measure- calibration standard for making pre-ments in the emerging discipline. cise underwater sound pressure mea-

During WorId War II, Frank Massa surements in the 10-100 kHz fre-turned to underwater acoustics and quency range.sonar development. His efforts helpedproduce the first successful scanningsonar and he designed a measure-

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Massa's TR-208A sonar transducer assembly area has seen 60,OOO-plusunits pass through.

Don Massa; president, has two worries:ingenuity in design and cleverness inmanufacturing.

depths. Overall impedance tolerancefor the hydrophones as well as theelectrical networks was held to anunprecedented ±I%.

Later, the company designed anddelivered over 60,000 TR-208A trans­ducer elements to the Navy for theAN / SQS-23 sonar system. PriorSQS-23 designs resulted in specifica-

ONR again turned to Massa to buildanother world's largest -a directionalunderwater receiving array that em­ployed over 6000 precision hydro­phones spaced in small groups on 200towers anchored along several kilo­meters of ocean floor at 1500-meter

"Those were the best yeaf3 1 everspent,' he relates, "because 1 got towork with a dozen highly skilledproduction engineers who taught methe importance of being able to pro­duce transducers as well as inventthem."

That concept is the backbone ofMassa Products today. Companyen­gineers are taught from the beginningthat they will have to live with theirdesigns from the lab bench throughproduction to shipping.

"They have two worries: ingenuityin design and cleverness in manufac­turing," Don Massa adds. When theproduction line stops or when there'sa hiccup in testing, the design engi­neer feels the sweat.

Massa's transd ucer productionhouse phase hit a high in the 1960swhen it responded to an emergencycall from the Office of Na val Research

to manufacture a massive, high power,low frequency electromagnetic trans­ducer array. An earlier ONR con­tractor had delivered a magnetostric­tive scroll array that literally blewapart under full power tests. TheMassa design for the megawatt sonararray-part of an acoustic DEW(Distant Early Warning) Line-con­tained 1440 separate transducers thatweighed 63 kilograms each. The entirearray weighed in at 136,000 kilo­grams and dwarfed it's platform, theNavy's USS Mission Capistrano. Itwas the world's largest sonar arrayand it worked like a charm.

On the strength of that success,

Frank Massa's brush with productionengineering grew to be the backbone ofMassa Products.

been assigned, somewhat against hiswishes, as a production manager atVictor. "I didn't know then the first

thing about production and there 1was in charge of it," he says. The taskwas development and production de­sign on a Navy contract for someelectro-acoustic systems for shipboardapplications.

(Continued from page 28)

Massa's career -and one that has givenMassa Products a profound edgetoday-was his brush with a conceptthat was foreign then to his pureengineering background and training:production engineering.

He told Sea Technology he had

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(ContinuedJrom page 31)

tions waivers to other companiesbecause they claimed the specifica­tions were beyond the state of the art.Production engineering at Massawas again the key to success: controlprocedures for aging, selecting andmatching ceramic elements eliminatedthe variables.

Another major achievement wasthe Massa design of the DT-282 and-283 line hydrophones for the PUFFSsonar system.

"These were the most precise hyd­rophones ever made," Don Massastates. "We controlled sensitivity towithin 0.1 dB in production and con­trolled the acoustic-center-to-mechan­ical-mounting tolerance to ten thou­sands of an inch over the six-footline."

The Navy testing facility at Or­lando, Florida, evaluated threePUFFS hydrophones randomly se­lected from the production line. Theirunusually brief report came back as asingle sentence: "The uniformity ofthese elements is beyond our abilityto measure."

Alter Course to Systems BusinessToday, Massa Products' well-honed

business strategy reflects the changein direction taken in the 1970s with

the advent of microprocessors. Thelarge electro-acoustic companies haddecided that only 10% of sonar de­velopments were in the transducers,leaving 90% of the value in micro­processor-based electronics. That'swhere 90%oftheif"effort went. Massarealized that it would be easier as a

transducer company to add the sys­tems capability than for the giants toadd-back a transducer capability.

The firm is still very active in whatDon Massa calls the "bedrock, "trans­ducers for sub-bottom profilers (TR­1075A and TR-I06IA units similar

to the Navy TR-208A), side-scansonars (TR-1101 for 97 kHz opera­tion), depth sounders (TR-I 083A lowfrequency units and the TR-I 002 andTR-1283E echo-ranging devices),deep ocean transponders (TR-1055Cfor depths to 6100 meters), under­water communications transducers

(TR-1036D), and general purposehydrophones (TR-I 025C for the 1-30kHz range and TR-1016 for 10-80kHz).

The other end of the spectrum­electro-acoustic systems-is equallysuccessful and the combination hasresulted in Massa Products' business

doubling every two years.

_/:'i~" .~...~,.-,- .Ceramic controls eliminate the variables.

tions, such as intrusion alarms, non­contact micrometers, motion detec­tors and remote control proximityindicators. Most notable of these­

which also heralded a jump fromtransducer manufacturer to total sys­tem supplier-is the ultrasonic array·for AMF's MagicScore automaticscoring system that has revolution­ized bowling.

Don Massa, himself a graduatelevel electrical engineer and no slouchin the patents-held department (withmore than a dozen for electro-acousticdevices and systems), is spearheadingMassa's latest innovation-the M­1002 portable sonar system, a lowfreq uency, long range sonar designedfor small research or military vessels.

Development on the M-1002 beganin 1981 as the result of yet anothercorporate look at ways to use Mas­sa's built-in ingenuity for transducersystems development. Don Massacharacterizes the resulting 3.3 kHzsystem as "the only one that two mencan throw over the side. "

In 1984, working with the ubiqui­tous Dr. Harold E. Edgerton-oneof Frank Massa's peers in age andtechnological status and a recent ad­dition to the company's board ofdirectors-Massa Products heeded"Doc's" call first to use the device inanother search for "Nessie" in Sco­tland's Loch Ness. Potential logisticsheadaches ruled that out. But Edger­ton was ready with another problem:

locating and studying whales under­water.

The system consists of two 27­kilogram boxes containing all theelectronics, power amplifier, com­puter-controlled processing and a pair'of CRT displays for graphics andcontrol. The M-1002's fish containsthe tninsinitting transducer and ahigh-precision multi-element receiv­ing array that can determine theexact bearing to a sonar target. Alsoincluded is an electronics module

containing a magnetic compass, depthand temperature sensors and a com­munications microcomputer.

Inhale or Exhale?The whale study question nearly

became moot when an Edgerton­assembled panel of marine expertscouldn't agree on whether whalesinhaled or exhaled when diving. Withlittle or no air in their otherwise hugelungs, whales would be virtually in­visible to sonar.

After five outings in 1984-twoaboard Massa's R/ V Decibel to checkout the M-1002 and three more on

the R/ V Edgerton to Stellwagen Bankin Massachusetts Bay-part of thequestion was finally settled.

During that third cruise aboardthe Edgerton, Don Massa was belowwith Doc Edgerton and two Massaengineers trying to determine whatwent wrong because the systemshowed a consistent echo from some­

thing about 800 meters off the portquarter.

"I was trying to figure out eitherwhere the big rock was on the chartor why the equipment failed whenRich Linnehan, the Edgerton s cap­tain, called down that he had spotteda humpback blowing in the samelocation," Don Massa relates. "It wasthen that we knew we had it."

The press of continuing business,he told Sea Technology, reduced thislast summer's tests on the Edgertonto just a couple of outings. Theresearch team recorded a wealth of

data that has yet to be analyzed.Plans are already in the works forextended attempts for further testsnext summer.

Massa Products Corporation stillhas an impressive backlog of pro­ducts to deliver and new projects todevelop. The pace and the promisefor this relatively small companyshows no sign of slowing. There arestill several "giant steps" to be takenin Massa's future. /st/

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