MTR 100: BIRNS, Inc. - Celebrating 60 Years

Posted by Irina Tabakina

BIRNS has supported the deep submergence oceanic community with products that deliver everything from faster, more robust communication to brilliance in the murky depths. The company’s contributions in the marine market began in the 1950s when it was asked to develop subsea systems for the US Navy for the highly classified Polaris underwater missile ejection project and later for Sealab. Today BIRNS is relied upon to provide powerful lighting solutions, from halogen to LED, as well as unique technologies like the BIRNS Titan, an intensely bright 4,000W, 380,000 lumen hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide (HMI) lighting system created for the Costa Concordia salvage project. In 1990, BIRNS launched its Connector Division in answer to increasing customer demand. BIRNS’ high performance connector lines quickly garnered major popularity, and the company went on to engineer highly successful lines like the 6km rated BIRNS Millennium range. These miniature, high-density metal shell connectors set the benchmark for elevated bandwidth delivery, and feature configurable inserts for both high (= 3.6kV) and low (= 600 V) voltage. BIRNS now leads the industry in fiber optics, with typical loss for cable assemblies of <.5 dB. The company specializes in cable assemblies integrating Electro-Opto-Mechanical (EOM) capabilities, which deliver huge amounts of power, data and signal, and provide load strengths of >50,000 lbs.   Recently, BIRNS was called upon to develop a set of ABS certified fiber optic penetrators for a manned submersible. The robust penetrators were custom overmolded and featured low insertion loss of < .2dB and high return loss of >35dB. The certification for optical penetrators was new territory for ABS, so the organization worked with BIRNS to develop rules for witnessing the testing of the new design.

The Case: BIRNS, Inc. is an ISO 9001:2008 certified global leader in the design and manufacturing of high performance connectors, custom cable assemblies and lighting systems. 2014 marks the company’s 60th anniversary of serving the industry and providing technologically advanced solutions trusted in some of the planet’s most demanding environments.

(As published in the July/Aug 2014 edition of Marine Technology Reporter - http://www.marinetechnologynews.com/Magazine)

Marine Technology Magazine, page 18, Jul 2014

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