This is a combined synopsis/solicitation for commercial items prepared in accordance with the format in Subpart 12.6 and 13.5, as supplemented with additional information included in this notice. THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION; QUOTES ARE BEING REQUESTED AND A WRITTEN SOLICITATION WILL NOT BE ISSUED. Reference Number is NWWG9502-10-05146 is issued as a Request for Quotation (RFQ). The solicitation document and incorporated provisions and clauses are those in effect through Federal Acquisition Circular 2005-33. The associated North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code is 334513 with a small business size standard of 500 employees or less. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Data Buoy Center (NDBC), requires the following items: Item 0001: Quantity of one each Teledyne RD Instruments, Model WHLS75-I-2 Deep Water 75kHz Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP) The required delivery date for item 0001 is March 30, 2010. All quotes shall be FOB Destination to: Bldg 3202, Stennis Space Center, Mississippi 39529. The following FAR provisions and clauses apply to this solicitation and are incorporated by reference: see FAR 52.252-1 Solicitation Provisions Incorporated By Reference (FEB 1998) and FAR 52.252-2 Clauses Incorporated by Reference (Feb 1998). This contract incorporates one or more clauses by reference, with the same force and effect as if they were given in full text. Upon request, the Contracting Officer will make their full text available. Also, the full text of a clause may be accessed electrically at the/these addresses: http://www.arnet.gov/far/ and http://oam.ocs.doc.gov/CAPPS_car.html. FAR 52.212-1, Instructions to Offerors - Commercial Items (NOV 2007) with addenda: FAR 52.211-6, Brand Name or Equal (AUG 1999) FAR 52.217-7, Option for Increased Quantity - Separately Priced Line Item (MAR 1989) CAR 1352.216-70 Contract Type (MAR 2000) This is a firm-fixed price type contract for supplies. CAR 1352.233-71 Service of Protests (MAR 2000) {Fill-in: Department of Commerce, NOAA, ERAD, Attn: Jeanette Spreemann, 200 Granby Street, 8th Floor, Norfolk, VA 23510} FAR 52.212-3, Offeror Representations and Certifications Commercial Items (NOV 2007). NOTE: Offerors may include paragraph (b) through (k) with quote OR enter electronically at https://orca.bpn.gov/ and submit paragraph (l) with quote. FAR 52.212-4, Contract Terms and Conditions Commercial Items (FEB 2007), with addenda: FAR 52.212-5, Contract Terms and Conditions Required to Implement Statutes or Executive Orders-Commercial Items (FEB 2008) {Fill-in: Part B, Check items 1, 5, 7, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28 and 36} In order to comply with the Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996, ALL CONTRACTORS must be registered in the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) to be considered for an award of a Federal contract. For information regarding registration in CCR, contact the CCR website at www.ccr.gov/index.cfm. Additionally, each offeror must obtain, and provide with the quote, their nine-digit Dun and Bradstreet (DUNS) number. All responsible sources may submit a quotation which shall be considered by the agency. Offers must be submitted in writing to the National Data Buoy Center, Bldg 1007 Stennis Space Center Mississippi 39529 by 4:00 PM (Central Standard Time) on Monday, January 25, 2010. Offers may be faxed to 228-688-3153 or sent electronically to
[email protected]. Anticipated award date is on or about Tuesday, January 26, 2010. Quotes are to remain effective for 30 days after close of solicitation. Contractors are encouraged to register with the FedBizOpps Vendor Notification Service. Potential offerors may direct all inquiries pertaining to the solicitation in writing to Kurt Weilbaecher at
[email protected] or faxed to 228-688-3153. Telephonic requests will not be honored. Name Brand Justification for Teledyne RD Incorporated The instruments are intended to be deployed for extended periods of time and provide near real-time accurate current data from numerous NDBC platforms. Configurations include but are not limited to buoys, C-MAN stations and sea-floor platforms. The specification provides details on four configurations intended for use at NDBC stations with different depths. These will be referred to as Deep Water (DW-DCP), Outer Shelf (OS-DCP), Inner Shelf (IS-DCP), and Shallow Water (SW-DCP).. These designations have been chosen to reflect the dominant oceanographic process driving the currents in these regions to allow vendors to tailor their instruments accordingly. Open ocean process drive the Deep Water, while winds and waves dominate the Inner Shelf and Shallow Water, respectively. The Outer Shelf is a transition between the Deep Water and Inner Shelf regions. The procured item shall include all hardware and software necessary to make tilt compensated measurements of North, East and Vertical current velocity components as a function of depth and ocean temperature (at the instrument). The instrument shall be battery powered, with externally programmable deployment parameters and sampling schemes. The instruments are intended to be deployed for nominal 1 year durations (400 days) drawing power from their own internal power source. The instruments will provide a current profile (ensemble) on an hourly basis to an NDBC payload on a continuous basis. Typical deployments will be from an in-line mooring cage or from a sea-floor mounted platform in a variety of ocean depths and temperatures. The instruments are required to meet the following basic performance characteristics for the duration of the deployment: ADCP Model Profiling Range (M) Bin Width (M) Std Deviation (cm/s) Deep Water (DW) 120-400 16 0.50 Medium Range (MR) 50-120 4 0.33 Short Range (SR) 20-50 2 0.25 Ultra-Short Range (USR) 5<20 1 0.20 The Profiling Ranges listed are based on expected deployment location depths. In this respect an Outer Shelf Doppler Profiler is expected to be equally effective in 50m of water as it is in 120m of water with "sonifying" the water column or suffering from side lobe interference. The instruments are expected to be able to profile the entire range of the water column of the deployment location to the upper limit of the instrument's range providing for an expected blanking distance based on the frequency of the instrument and the size of the bins used. The instrument shall be able to ping and process enough data to meet the standard deviations in the table above for the entirety of the deployment duration specified above and the nominal bin width detailed in the table. The instruments shall be constructed of a single pressure vessel to include all hardware, transducers, batteries, and electronics. The pressure vessel shall have a minimum depth rating of at least 150m for all sensors with the exception of the DW which shall have a minimum rating of 400m. Options shall be available to purchase alternate pressure housings with depth ratings exceeding 5000m. The pressure housing shall be cylindrical for use with NDBC in-line mooring cages with a diameter of 7" (+/- ¼"). Minimum clear area in the cylindrical portion for attachment of "belly" clamps on the cage is 4". The DW version shall provide room for at least two "belly" clamps with a minimum of 12" separating them. In addition to the provisions for belly clamps, provisions for through-holes on the bottom flange are desired for potential mounting to sea-floor platforms. The length of the instrument shall not exceed 16-1/2" for all instruments except for the DW version which is limited to 42" due to expected increased battery capacity to meet requirements. All external features of the housing including hardware/fittings shall be corrosion resistant or adequately protected from corrosion with cathodic protection for a minimum of a 1 year deployment. All external dissimilar metals shall be completely electrically isolated from one another. Preference will be given to external hardware that is corrosion-free (i.e. Titanium). The overall outside diametric dimension of the transducer assembly shall not exceed 21-3/4" in order to ensure that the entire assembly is properly protected within existing in-line mooring cages. The instrument shall meet the performance criteria in 2.2 using internal replaceable battery packs. These performance specs need to be attained with alkaline-based batteries. Vendors may submit provisions for lithium battery power systems but these shall not be a substitute for meeting the alkaline-based battery performance criterion. The battery packs must be easily replaceable and the vendor shall provide a procedure for this process prior to award. As part of the bid the vendor shall provide cost information for the replaceable battery packs in quantities of 1, 5, 10, and 20. In addition to this internal battery pack, provisions shall be made to externally power the unit. Preference will be given to vendors that can externally power the unit and have the ability to connect to multiple external battery cases (in pressure housings) in a daisy chain configuration via the external power connector. In order to reduce the chance of catastrophic hydrogen build-up in the pressure housing, the vendor shall ensure that all aluminum components are completely isolated (through coating or physical means) from the potential of battery acid leaking from damaged cells and on to these components. Additionally, the vendor shall provide a means in which to relieve the internal pressure of the housing and sample/purge the internal gases prior to opening. The instrument shall be able to measure the tri-axial velocity of the current profile to the following standards. The instrument shall be able to achieve these results in either an upward-looking or downward-looking configuration. Relative Velocity: +/- 5m/s (Resolution 1mm/s, Accuracy +/- 5 mm/s or +/-1% of velocity) Direction: 0-360 deg (Resolution 0.1 deg, Accuracy +/- 2 deg) The instrument shall correct for instrument tilt and options shall be available to allow the instrument to track the ocean bottom or ocean surface in order to correct for lateral motion of the instrument platform (i.e. buoy) during the course of sampling. Extra pings required to accomplish this task are separate from the performance requirements of section 2.2 (i.e. if bottom tracking is selected on a DW-DCP then the number of "water" pings may be reduced in order to perform this additional function). This bottom tracking information shall be transmitted as part of the ensemble real time message. Preference will be given to internal firmware that actively employs the bottom-tracking information to remove the motion of the platform and determine the true current profile. The instrument shall be equipped with a temperature sensor: 0-40 deg Celsius (Resolution: 0.01 deg, Accuracy: +/- 0.5 deg) for the purpose of making accurate speed of sound measurements. The transducer for this instrument shall be mounted such that it does not present itself as a potential snag point. The number and size of the bins shall be user-selectable at the time of deployment. At a minimum, the instrument shall be capable of measuring 64 distinct bins. Preference will be given to instrument setup parameters that allow the DCP to have varied bins sizes in order to achieve higher resolution layers around areas of interest (i.e. in a downward-looking configuration mounted from a buoy it may be desirable to measure the upper bins in tight layers and then gradually expand these as the depth increases). TRANSDUCERS The instrument transducers shall be arranged in a 4-beam (clocked at 90 degree intervals) convex configuration. This arrangement is required in order to provide redundancy in the measurement if any one beam is blocked or experiences interference from a mooring line or from fish. The transducer assembly shall be removable from the instrument pressure housing for the purpose of maintenance and refinishing. The transducers shall be able to operate properly if painted with anti-fouling paint or other coating to reduce the damage from hard-bodied barnacles and other marine life. The vendor shall recommend a coating or coating system to reduce the likelihood of bio-fouling. The instrument shall be equipped with a tilt sensor having a minimum of 2-axes. (Resolution: 0.01 deg, Accuracy: +/- 0.5 deg, Range: +/- 15 deg) for the purpose of accounting for semi-permanent heel angles of in-line mooring cages and resting angles of sea-floor platforms. Preference will be given to instruments that can accomplish this measurement in a dynamic environment and subsequently account for this positioning on a ping-for-ping basis for the purpose of removing the effect of the relative motion of the mooring or buoy if hard mounted to the buoy . COMMUNICATIONS The instrument shall be configurable from a standard Personal Computer (PC) serial port using RS232 communication protocol. At a minimum, the user shall be able to configure the instrument using the following parameters; Pings/Ensemble, Number of Depth Bins, Depth of Bins, Ensembles/Hour, Duration of Deployment, and Output format. The instrument shall be able to communicate through this same serial port during a normal deployment. The instrument shall be able to communicate at both 1200 and 9600 baud. The instrument shall be equipped with a removable, internal, non-volatile memory storage system using a commercially available format. Capacity for this storage shall be at a minimum capable of storing twice the expected data from the performance specs listed in section 2.2 (including individual ping data and housekeeping data). It is advantageous for NDBC to have the output format of its DCPs be the same in order to reduce the costs associated with real-time shore-side processing. To support this effort, the vendor shall modify their firmware upon request in order to provide data in a Government-supplied format. The instrument shall have output formats that are 100% compatible with the Seabird Inductive Modem protocol and with the GOES Data Collection System telemetry protocol and format. Preference will be given to vendors that incorporate internal inductive modem capability into their instrument as an option. SOFTWARE The vendor shall provide programming, test, and data processing software that is executable on a standard Windows 2000 PC or notebook computer. This software shall include, but not be limited to, absolute current profile data processing to standard engineering units (Meters-Kilograms-Seconds), programming and recording of deployment parameters, bit extraction software for creation of ASCII text files, and diagnostics testing. Data products produced by the software shall include time series of either current magnitude and direction or North/South and East/West components as a function of depth and time in their proper deployment configuration. Data products shall be produced by the software on the computer monitor and in hardcopy format. Diagnostics shall include at a minimum; verification of operational status, fault isolation, and fault identification. The vendor shall also provide software that allows the user to accurately estimate the power use of the unit for different deployment configurations. The instrument shall be equipped with or have the software for performing internal diagnostics to check at a minimum the health of the internal circuit boards, battery pack(s), and transducers. In addition, the contractor shall provide a test plan with equipment specifications for performing laboratory verification of the operation of the acoustic signal processing and the operation of the transducers. This may consist of inserting a known sound into a tank with the instrument to ensure that the proper output is received from the signal processing circuitry. This test can also be any other appropriate test that performs that same verification. The instrument shall also demonstrate the ability to correct for the magnetic influence of the internal battery pack(s) and maintain the compass performance specification in paragraph 2.5 Preference will be given to instruments that have real-time diagnostics in the firmware that allows the instrument to analyze and flag data as questionable. Vendors shall provide details on the capabilities and limitations of these functions along with details on how to adjust any parameters to maximize the accuracy of real-time transmitted data. The contractor shall provide NDBC with documentation and test data demonstrating the proof-of-concept of their instrument against a known profile source or separately measured values from an independent instrument. If this documentation has been provided in the past to NDBC in is not necessary to duplicate this effort. The following items shall be provided for each instrument that is purchased: a) Instrument including fresh internal batteries (minimum remaining shelf life of 2 yrs) b) New memory storage card c) External power supply for laboratory testing (110 VAC input, output compatible with instrument voltage and current requirements) d) RS-232 interface cable e) Documents as per 3.1 and 3.2 f) Software as per 2.9 g) Service Kit (including at a minimum, replacement seals and hardware along with necessary assembly tools) h) Ruggedized shipping container for marine applications for items a-g