Nestled between a cornfield and the East-West Tollway in Naperville is a place where tragedies are relived and mysteries solved, all under the brainy microscope of Packer Engineering Inc.
The firm`s engineers use the term failure analysis a lot. That`s technical talk for explaining why things collapse or crash or snap under stress, or countless other variations of failure that cost lives and millions of dollars.
When a DC-10 lost an engine and crashed into Elk Grove Village, Packer Engineering was there. And when McCormick Place burned. So, too, when a walkway collapsed in the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Mo. In short, when disaster strikes, Packer scientists are often there, nailing down the elusive why.
Packer Engineering isn`t just a scientific sleuthing firm, and its employees are more than professional problem solvers. But that is their best- known service: as Du Page County`s Ph.D.-rich firm that tackles all manner of disasters, from dubious car crashes to suspect fires, counting on scientific reason to explain problems that to the layman might seem incalculably complex.
A tour of the Packer plant is a little like wandering into a Willy Wonka`s Chocolate Factory for physicists. The testing contraptions outnumber the company`s 100 employees, who Edward Caulfield, the firm`s chief operating officer and an expert mechanical engineer and metallurgist, estimates are working on about 2,500 projects at any one time.
”Every day, we open more projects than we close,” said Caulfield. ”We always have too much work, and we like it that way. We work on different projects every day.” Caulfield himself is playing a role in about 100, he said.
One worker is making a decelerator sled, a set of railroad-type tracks that will be used, basically, to smash things. ”The object is getting `em up to speed and roaring along to about 40 m.p.h. and then letting `em hit something,” Caulfield said.
Caulfield points out one of the plant`s drop towers, a machine that simulates collisions with a high-speed vertical fall, like a ride at Great America. On this day it is being used to test the strength and elasticity of individual car floor panels. A dozen test panels, each mangled by a 40 m.p.h. drop, sit on a nearby table awaiting analysis.
”The idea is to get as much energy into the automobile as possible,” he said. ”If you make it into a beer can, that`s good. The main goal is to design it to be as flexible as possible.”
Caulfield next moves to a project he is directing personally, a steel subject towering some 25 feet high. It looks like a ship`s anchor or a gargantuan fish hook, but it`s actually a broken hook from a crane used off the coast of Morgan City, La., to move an oil drilling platform off a boat.
The hook broke, dropping the massive platform onto the boat. Packer, Caulfield and a dozen other engineers have spent some two years investigating the cause of the accident. ”Finding the truth takes time,” said Caulfield.
”But we`re close to an answer.”
Packer Engineering is the brainchild of Ken Packer, an ex-Marine fighter pilot, ex-University of Michigan professor and engineer extaordinaire, who has a knack for recruiting top engineering talent to what is a highly unorthodox firm.
”You get to be a little bit like Sherlock Holmes,” Packer said, noting how his firm`s engineers can dissect an auto crash based on such details as witness marks (where people inside the auto hit), how the fabric of seatbelts stretched and how the auto`s frame bent.
While working toward a doctorate at Purdue University, Packer developed
”a plan for a company that would be somewhat enlightened in its approach, to sell technical services to small companies that couldn`t afford to have such employees on its staff. . . . I look back and think about how naive I was in what I wrote down.”
But enough of it made sense, he noted, because ”this fictional company became Packer Engineering.”
A high-profile part of Packer Engineering`s work is in the courtroom, preparing models of its findings for easy comprehension and visualization by jurors.
Packer Engineering is not just a sleuthing firm, however.
”We wouldn`t be capable of this problem-solving if we weren`t keeping our hands in the academic pursuits,” he said. ”The litigation work is glamorous, but you need that foundation. Otherwise it`s all show, and you can overdo the showmanship. We`d like to see the substance of our work played up.”
Packer Engineering`s bread and butter is in providing advice to companies before accidents occur and in developing safety-oriented products and technologies. And as a member of the East-West Corporate Corridor Association, Packer is big on promoting Illinois technology in general.
”We are trying to do two things at Packer Engineering,” he said. ”One is to expand the upper limits of our abilities and knowledge, and at the same time we are trying to expand the hands-on capabilities of our firm.”
Packer the man is as active as Packer the company. He maintains a hands-on schedule, working on many investigations as just one member of a team. Currently he is leading the look into a crash in Pennsylvania involving a single-engine aircraft and has his hand in several other projects.
”I wouldn`t have it any other way,” he said. ”I don`t want to be a pencil pusher. If I couldn`t stay close to doing or building things I`d lose my ability in a hurry.”
Some of his projects reflect Packer`s personality and background. As both a commercial pilot and a farmer who still tends to his family`s ”corn patch” west of Naperville, he focuses his inquiry on air crashes and farm-related problems such as designing anti-buckling silos and analyzing accidents involving farm machinery.
”It`s usually a hardworking head of a household who has a nice family,” he said, referring to the people involved in the farming accidents he studies. ”Those are tough cases to take on.”
As in all Packer Engineering`s research, a large percentage (more than half) of accidents are attributed to human error, he said.
”We find machinery to be defective not as often as people might think,” he said.
”It`s a challenge, testifying and trying to make things understandable to jurors,” Packer said. ”It really makes you work. The courtroom is a great forum.”
Packer Engineering findings often make or break a court case, and its work draws praise, even when it comes to conclusions contrary to the desires of those who hired the firm.
One example from August, 1985: Packer engineers studied the crash of a CTA bus and an auto on Lake Shore Drive in which seven people died. The bus driver had been charged by then-Cook County State`s Atty. Richard Daley with reckless homicide. However, after reconstructing the accident at the state`s attorney`s request, the company found that the bus driver was not to blame.
At the time, Daley praised Packer Engineering as ”one of the country`s outstanding experts in . . . accident reconstruction work.”
That isn`t to say Packer Engineering bats a thousand on its assignments.
For example, in one highly publicized case last October of an Orland Hills home that had mysteriously caught on fire repeatedly, Packer engineers, hired by an insurance company, took infrared photographs to try to see heat differentials in the house but could not locate the source of the fires. The bilevel was razed.
Packer`s services don`t come cheap. Engineers charge $100 to $120 an hour, and an average completed project will cost $50,000, according to Caulfield.
But Packer is the creme de la creme of a burgeoning business. Its only other competitor of a similar expertise and size is Failure Analysis Association, based in Palo Alto, Cal.
Packer`s operations include a Detroit subsidiary and have expanded to an independently run affiliate in Florida. However, another subsidiary in Minneapolis closed last January. The Naperville national headquarters houses three-fourths of the firm`s projects, according to Caulfield.
Much of what Packer Engineering is devloping must remain a secret, he said. ”There`s a lot I can`t say. A lot of our knowledge is the client`s property, and some is just too exciting to give away to other folks.”
One juicy tidbit: ”One of our men claims to have invented the next version of the electric light, the first major improvement since Thomas Edison.” The firm also is involved in developing technology for hypersonic aircraft and in making cars that can crash ”safely” at speeds of 50 m.p.h., rather than the standard 30 m.p.h. today, Packer said.
”Sometimes we compete against the big boys and sometimes individuals,”
he said of their research and development. ”But, quite frankly, we don`t look at it as competition. Competition means you`re trying to beat out the other fellow by any means. We often end up working with the people were bidding against.”
Packer Engineering is more competitive than larger firms, Packer said. because of the high caliber of its employees, some of whom are the best and brightest from engineering colleges, while others are college professors.
”They`re not the best in the country, they`re the best in the world,”
he said in earnest, adding the quip, ”and they have good personalities, too.”
The engineers are given top equipment to work with. The firm contracts with expert modelers to create working models at 1/2-inch to 1-foot scale. Their cameras are able to record accident reconstructions at 1,000 frames per second.
And they can analyze the content of a metal with a scanning electron microscope, which within about 10 minutes can create a computer graphic detailing the metal`s chemical composition, thereby detecting imperfections or impurities in it. It can create razor-sharp images of a substance of up to 10,000 times life-size.
The firm is on the cutting edge of reconstructing events not by working models but by animated computer images, as Carl Anderson, director of Parker`s animation workstation, explained.
”What we can do is create objects and a world for these objects to be in and manipulate these objects any way we want,” said Anderson, noting the goal ”to animate real objects with real conditions.” It`s not enough, he said, for the three-dimensional drawings to be drawn accurately and their actions to conform to physical laws. ”It has to be a provable performance.” ”This is something most animators can`t do: being able to draw the car photogrammetrically in 3-D,” he said, showing a computer-simulated house reproduced to such perfection that interior details are clearly visible and in proper proportion inside its windows.
Anderson showed a videotape used in a recent civil suit involving a fatal auto crash. Repeatedly, one car passes a tractor-trailer on the left and toward an oncoming car, going into a skid and being broadsided. The perspectives shift every few seconds, with each impact: first from the side, then behind the wheel, then from a bird`s-eye view.
Another car-crash scenario pops on the screen, this one of a lone auto veering off the road and into a pole.
”Did the driver fall asleep?” asked Caulfield.
”She was tending the child in the baby chair,” Anderson responded coolly.
”This computer reconstruction takes the place of models, and it`s a lot faster,” he said. ”And once you set it, you can go anywhere you want.” But such technology, already outstripping that of competitors, is just a start toward unlimited possibilities, he said. ”We want to evolve the system to let the computer do all the gathering and to reconstruct the accident itself, start the cars itself.”
For example, the company successfully helped defend General Motors Corp. against a claim that defective brakes led to a fatal collision last winter. Through verifiable reconstruction, ”we were able to demonstrate it was a function of the icy road,” Caulfield recalled.
The future for the firm appears rosy, Caulfield said.
”Our growth patterns in the past 10 years have been great, but I expect our growth patterns in the next 10 years will be even better because of our strong scientific base,” he said.
”This is the best place in the world for diversification. People may work here on different projects each day. That`s the attraction. We look at Packer Engineering as part university and part industry. We`re somewhere in the middle. We do a good job of making engineering reality.”
Packer said he has never woken up and felt reluctant to go to work.
”I still have a hard time understanding how successful we were, and how quickly,” he said. ”I can`t wait for the bubble to burst. I thought I was in for a very long period of hand-to-mouth existence. For some reason, we started on successfully and we haven`t stopped. It`s been amazing. . . . I love to work here.”
