Completion Date:     5/1/2015

Square Footage:      368000

Building Use:           The building is an aircraft manufacturing facility for the U.S. Navy’s E-2D Advanced Hawkeye.

Location:                 St. Augustine, FL

Project Description:

In early 2013, Northrop Grumman announced the creation of five Centers of Excellence across the United States for its Aerospace Systems sector, as a way to improve its strategic alignment with customers’ need for increasingly innovative and affordable products, services and solutions. Two of these Centers of Excellence are located in Florida, at St. Augustine and Melbourne.

The Austin Company provided planning, architectural design, engineering and construction services for the expansion of Northrop Grumman’s Aircraft Integration Center of Excellence in St. Augustine, including Building 100 – the new production home for the U.S. Navy’s E-2D Advanced Hawkeye aircraft.

The new 368,000 SF aircraft manufacturing facility is located on an existing Northrop Grumman site and was designed and built on an accelerated schedule to meet E-2D production schedules.

Phase One, completed in May 2015, was delivered in just 16 months and includes: a 220,000 SF High Bay; 60,000 SF of office and support space; 13,000 SF auditorium and cafeteria; and 14,000 SF of initial-phase mechanical and electrical support space. The team beat an originally projected 18-month schedule, despite heavy rains that impacted several months of construction.

Production requirements necessitated large clear span floor areas with 40-foot clear height above the finish floor. Steel trusses 220 feet long span the center high bay, with 85-foot steel trusses spanning the north and south side bays. Each of the 220-foot long by 28-foot high steel trusses weighs over 160,000 pounds. The space between the 220-foot truss bottom chord and the top chord was carefully designed with eight platforms to allow for the housing of air conditioning air handling units, as well as distribution ductwork and maintenance access catwalks.

The building’s exterior envelope is an architectural Insulated Metal Panel (IMP) system with low-e, high-performance and hurricane projectile resistant exterior window glazing for the office mezzanine. In addition, the wall separating the offices from the production high bay was designed as a double wall system to block manufacturing sound transmission from the manufacturing high bay.

The building was designed to withstand hurricane winds up to 130 mph. The production center bay’s 215-foot clear-width bottom-rolling sliding door was specially detailed to run inside the clear opening of the door without any roof overhang to meet this requirement. Typically, most high bay door systems are designed to run outside of the clear opening for the door, resulting in a large overhang of the roof framing system and a soffit, not desirable in a high wind zone. To support the 30-foot high, bottom-

rolling sliding door system, horizontal structural steel framing was designed to brace and transfer the load to the main roof truss bottom chord level at 40 feet above the finished floor.

Phase Two has a targeted completion in mid-2016. After the completion of Phase One, Northrop Grumman moved out of two small adjacent buildings and into Building 100. Austin demolished those buildings and is constructing an “addition” to Building 100 to house 73,000 SF of support shops.

C.O.T.E. | Committee on the Environment

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