Digs: Inside 3M Innovation Center

Telecommunications is not the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they think of 3M. The Maplewood, Minnesota-based manufacturing company made its name in the adhesive business, but it also has a complete division dedicated to telecom, which supplies copper and fiber optic connectivity, management and diagnostic solutions to communication services suppliers around the world.

Over the past several years, 3M has been investing in developing telecom infrastructure products such as the Slim Lock enclosure, which is designed to quickly weatherproof cables on cell towers. In June, the company announced the purchase of fall-protection equipment maker Capital Safety from global investment firm KKR for $2.5 billion. Capital Safety’s products include harnesses, lanyards and self-retracting lifelines that protect tower climbers from falls.

In this episode of “Digs,” RCRtv got an exclusive tour of 3M’s 1.25 million square foot Innovation Center in Austin, Texas, to check out the company’s telecommunications products and see how the company tests its products to ensure they meet customer demands.

“3M has a history of leveraging its materials knowledge and other core areas into new products and so we leverage a lot of the materials, sealing and innovative ideas 3M has in our telecommunication products to ensure connectivity,” explained Zach Thompson, product development specialist at 3M.

As part of the tour, Thompson demoed the Slim Lock, which is a two-part concept using a reusable foam-backed gel surface inside and a waterproof UV resistant casing on the outside. It is designed to be installed with just one hand.

Advanced technologist Laura “Dreamcrusher” Hurley took the demo a step further, showing us how 3M rigorously tests the Slim Lock at minus-18 degrees Celsius to make sure it can withstand extreme conditions.

“We also call this the popsicle test, so I have to put on a thin layer of water to create 6 milliliters of ice on each one of these samples and it does take a while, all day usually,” Hurley explained of the testing process.

The test is one of many product tests done by Hurley and her colleagues at the 3M testing facility. “Here at 3M Austin Center, we have 33 environmental chambers that do temperature, humidity, a variety of extreme weather conditions,” she said. “We mostly test to Telcordia specifications, but what makes 3M unique is that we do our in-house testing. We do all our testing ourselves. This year alone we’ve done 100 test requests and at any given time we can have 20 to 40 test requests in progress.”

Hurley lived up to her “Dreamcrusher” nickname during the fiber optic splice enclosure test. The 100-foot pound impact tests consists of dropping a 20 pound weight five feet onto the closure, which has been stored at minus-30 degrees Celsius.

The splice enclosure got the best of Hurley in the first several rounds of testing, standing up to the impact without much trouble until Hurley finally punctured the enclosure after putting it back in the temperature chamber for a bit more cooling.

This process ensures that defective products don’t reach the hands of 3M customers.

In addition to Slim Lock and splice enclosure, 3M also recently teamed with Sprint on a quick fix for tower theft and vandalism. The two companies provided a use case for the 3M No Polish Connector, along with the recently introduced 3M Easy Cleaver to fix the damage to a junction box at the base of a vandalized tower in Little Falls, New Jersey. The field-terminated connector solution allowed the outage to be fixed without replacing cables.

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