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Brighton Science Blog
Navigating the Solvent Switch: A Sustainable Future for Parts Cleaning
Manufacturers who use solvent-based industrial parts cleaning processes must find alternative methods. Solvent-based cleaning processes use chemicals that emit or release Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). These are coming under increased scrutiny due to their harmful effects on health and the...
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Corona Treatment Concerns You Need to Take a Closer Look At
Disclaimer: This article is NOT about COVID-19; it is about a surface treatment process for better surface preparation and adhesion properties in manufacturing. If you're looking for information about cleaning, here's an article that discusses the difference between biological cleanliness and...
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Revolutionizing Multi-Site Manufacturing: Unleashing Operational Excellence Through Standardized Surface Quality Measurement
Are inconsistencies in bonding between your multi-site manufacturing lines creating poor-quality parts, like a band singing out of tune? This article will help you to identify and resolve those issues for good. Discover what causes inconsistent bonding, learn how to manage it, and get your...
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Is Inconsistent Surface Preparation Hurting Your Bottom Line? Here's the Fix.
In manufacturing, consistent and high-quality products are paramount to success. Surface preparation is critical in ensuring product performance, appearance, and durability. However, variations in surface preparation processes across an enterprise can lead to inconsistencies, inefficiencies, and...
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What is Surface Treatment? A Comprehensive Guide to Surface Treatment Methods for Manufacturers
In the world of manufacturing, surface treatment plays a crucial role in achieving high-performance adhesion. Whether bonding, coating, sealing, painting, or printing, every manufacturer understands the significance of a well-defined adhesion process. Think of adhesion as the glue that holds a...
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Unlock the Key to Successful Adhesive Bonding: What You Need to Know Beyond Adhesive Technical Data Sheets
Manufacturers are increasingly utilizing a greater number of adhesive materials as a joining technique in the construction of their products, and the importance of these uses is continuously increasing with each passing year. As a result, the consequences of adhesive bond failures are becoming more...
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Contact Angle Goniometer 101: A Guide to Successfully Measuring Contact Angle
Have you wondered why some paints or coatings adhere effortlessly while others leave blisters or bubbles? The answer lies in wettability, the intricate dance between a liquid and a surface governed by a powerful principle known as contact angle. And measuring this microscopic tango? That's where...
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Sustainable Manufacturing: How to Overcome the Hidden Obstacles Using Post-Consumer Recycled Plastics (PCR)
Many businesses within the industrial sector are pushing for sustainable manufacturing initiatives, but one of the biggest challenges in sustainability is dealing with plastics and their disposal. Some leading manufacturers, including a number of automotive companies, are introducing a new...
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Fundamentals of Adhesion Science & Why 3 Molecular Layers Matter
Adhesion is crucial in microscopic and macroscopic worlds, yet it is an often-overlooked force. Adhesion acts as the invisible glue that unites objects, both massive and minute. Adhesion allows us to construct monumental structures like bridges, buildings, and airplanes. It enables us to glue wood...
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4 Common Factors that Impact Conformal Coating Adhesion
The widespread use of electronics in all manufacturing sectors has presented distinct difficulties. Manufacturers are responsible for safeguarding these electronic devices in harsh conditions that render electronics susceptible to even the slightest traces of moisture, particles, and environmental ...
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Silicone Contamination: The Invisible Intruder to Quality in Assembly Line Production
Some manufacturers go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate the presence of silicone in their manufacturing facilities. Some manufacturers invest significant resources in cleaning procedures to eradicate any silicone contamination. These approaches can be revolutionized by the development of a...
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How to Control Your Adhesive Process: Find the Critical Control Points
In today's highly competitive manufacturing environment, controlling the adhesive process is vital to ensuring product quality, consistency, and efficiency. Understanding the Critical Control Points (CCPs) within the adhesive process is essential for maintaining control and achieving desired...
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The Thought Behind our New Brighton Academy
Over the past decade, we have been told that our science is the cornerstone of our customer relationships. Whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or just recently joined the BConnect community, during your journey with us, we’ve likely shared our scientific insights with you. This may have...
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How to Propel Enterprise Success through Effective Knowledge Sharing of Bonding Processes
Wind turbines have a problem: their giant blades fail more often than anticipated. Research on the issue, reported in the journal Materials, notes an average of 3,800 failures each year. Many of these result from adhesive bonding defects, which should be addressed and prevented through improved...
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Maximize Manufacturing Excellence: Harness the Potential of Surface Quality Verification and Certification
In manufacturing, surfaces hold immense significance, and their value can be traced back to the inception of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) during the 20th century. The establishment of the FAA emerged as a response to mounting concerns surrounding quality control and the occurrence of...
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Adhesive Bonding vs. Mechanical Fastening in Product Design: The Pros and Cons
When creating their next innovative product, designers, and manufacturers strive to achieve optimal performance while minimizing assembly and materials costs. In this pursuit, they often focus on optimizing material usage. In the quest to achieve optimization, it is uncommon for excess materials to...
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The Water Break Test as a Surface Measurement Gauge
The water break test is a common way for manufacturers to test the surface cleanliness of metal surfaces. Compared to other legacy cleanliness tests, it is relatively simple to perform. However, the results rely almost entirely on the subjective eye of the person performing the test. Hydrophobic...
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Surface Intelligence: A New Opportunity in Supply Chain Management
Water contact angle seems like an obscure technical curiosity, but what if we said it could help you improve profitability and win new business? Water contact angle provides information about surface energy, which tells you about the condition of a surface. This information is rarely used in the ...
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Unlock Success in Adhesive Bonding: The Definitive Troubleshooting Guide
Manufacturers have numerous options at their disposal when it comes to preventing product failures resulting from imperfect adhesive bonding. Often, the approach is to simply accept adhesive bonding failures as part of the scrap rate and move on. In other cases, companies may completely revamp...
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Ensuring Top-Quality Solder Joints on ENIG PCBs: Best Practices Unveiled
The field of printed circuit board (PCB) finishing and bonding methods has been growing and diversifying for decades. PCB design depends heavily on the use and environment of the electronic package, and those design decisions include what Surface Mount Technology (SMT) is employed. SMT involves the...
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Surface Inspection 101: A Visual Guide to the Surface Analyst, Water Break Tests, and Dyne Ink
In the manufacturing industry, it is crucial to meet certain surface preparation requirements in order to ensure the safety and reliability of products. Various tests have been developed to determine if these requirements are being met and if the cleaning process has been effective enough to...
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The Hidden Costs of Human Choices: Compromising Optimal Product Design and Manufacturing
In the realm of manufacturing and production, achieving strong and durable bonds is crucial for ensuring the quality and reliability of products. However, even with meticulous adherence to established processes, companies can sometimes face unexpected challenges that hinder their bonding...
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![Identifying Adhesive Bond Failure Points in Manufacturing [Key Considerations]](https://www.brighton-science.com/hs-fs/hubfs/images/blog-images/instron-adhesion-test-blog.jpg?width=372&height=180&name=instron-adhesion-test-blog.jpg)
Identifying Adhesive Bond Failure Points in Manufacturing
One particular area that has proven to be a challenge in manufacturing is adhesion and surface quality. Research and development teams, product developers, and manufacturing operations frequently encounter difficulties with adhesion processes, such as coating or adhesion problems throughout the...
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Demystifying Dyne Levels: A Comprehensive Guide
The evaluation of material surfaces in terms of quality has long relied on dyne testing. Despite their drawbacks, such as subjectivity, imprecision, damage to surfaces, and safety risks for users, dyne tests have remained popular among manufacturers due to their wide availability and affordability....
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Discover the Top Alternative to Dyne Testing That Gets Results
Dyne solutions have been the most common method of quality-checking material surface cleanliness for decades. Their ubiquity and low cost have led them to be heavily relied upon by manufacturers even though they are imprecise, destructive to surfaces, and harmful to the user. The science behind...
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How to Enhance Your Real-Time Production Monitoring of Material Surface Quality
The globalization of supply chains, diversification of team locations, outsourcing of essential organizational functions, and the digitalization of data and communication have made the world accessible to small and medium-sized manufacturers, challenging both large and small enterprises to respond...
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Launch Faster and Smarter: How to Streamline New Product Development with Surface Intelligence
As an increasing number of manufacturers adopt the fundamental principles of Industry 4.0, they are reaping the rewards of its key concepts. These include the integration of systems and processes, information transparency, and the commercialization of smart technology. This, in turn, promotes a...
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Are You Ready for Zero Defect Manufacturing? Discover the Top Industry 4.0 Strategies
It's important to recognize that assuming control over the future based on past or present circumstances is a common misconception. The events of 2020 have taught us a valuable lesson - we should never be overconfident enough to believe that we can predict the challenges that lay ahead.Furthermore,...
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Accelerate Your Digital Transformation: Why SaaS is the Fastest Path to Success
Business operations change daily, if not more frequently. While some businesses are content working inside a structure that hasn’t been updated for 20 years, others are looking to optimize their digital transformation strategies to match the digitalization of the twenty-first century. “The biggest...
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How a Cleanliness Specification Increases Quality Process Control in the Supply Chain
Undoubtedly, you’ve been working toward specific sustainability goals and specializing your skills to do one thing well instead of multiple things moderately well or even poorly. But if your goals align around sustainability, it’s crucial to understand who your suppliers are and how your final...
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How Contact Angle Measurements Can Spectacularly Reduce Scrap Rates Today
Last Updated March 2023 Predicting production outcomes in manufacturing relies on accurate data that calculates the variables that actually affect things like reliability, performance, and longevity of the product, like the soundness of bonds. There are countless tests to examine every conceivably...
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Surface Analyst Technology Replaces the Old Language of Dyne Ink
For over a decade, manufacturers and suppliers have spoken the language of dyne when dealing with surface preparation and treatment verification. Because the process of dyne analysis requires users to interpret the way the ink spreads on a surface, it is highly subjective, making the language of...
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The Relationship Between Total Quality Management Systems and Sustainability
In the age of sustainability practices becoming more of the norm, there are a few ways in which your company can both abide by new regulatory standards concerning sustainable changes to the chemicals used and have a positive impact on your total quality management standards.
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The Knowing Doing Gap: How to Avoid Widespread Adhesion Issues
At Brighton Science, we talk about surface intelligence and how it can be used to optimize manufacturing processes from the earliest stages. In response, organizations often say, “Great! That’s the key to solving, preventing, and controlling bonding issues, right? But do we have surface...
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How Surface Intelligence Can Improve Your Return on Investment
“For every company, its competitiveness comes from its ability to assimilate knowledge and failure - which I tell my kids all the time - failure is an opportunity to learn and feedback is a gift. And if we take the 'quick fix' we take the learning off the table.” Andy Reeher, CEO, Brighton Science
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Guess the Contact Angle: IPA Wiped Composite Material
This 'Guess the Contact Angle' video is the first of our next series of videos focusing on how contact angle changes when a composite surface is cleaned or treated in various ways. The contact angle featured in this demo is formed by a water droplet deposited using the handheld Surface Analyst on...
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The Top 5 Things Product Development Teams Need to Know About Real-World Manufacturing Challenges
Roles matter. Everyone within an organization is responsible for producing the most excellent and reliable new products in manufacturing. There is one downside to this - it can lead to siloed thinking. It can even discourage a common language between design teams and technicians dealing with...
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Why Your Business Should Reject a Culture of 'Quick Fixes'
Quality gurus have long preached the importance of getting to the root of the problem. So why, then, when managers understand this so well, do organizations settle for the quick fix? It’s like taking a painkiller for a headache: the pain goes away for a while, but if there’s an underlying cause,...
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Why a Surface Chemistry Input Should be Included in New Product Specifications
When development teams are looking to build a new product that includes a coating, bonding, painting, or sealing process, it's only natural to consider what kind of adhesive, coating, or paint will perform the best. While these selections are critical to the end product's success, development teams...
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How Surface Quality Can Negatively Impact Product Launches
Manufacturing is a team effort. And as such, when an issue arises with the product (usually caught when scrap rates skyrocket and returns, recalls, and warranty claims make it clear something was missed), it can be difficult to precisely isolate the root cause of the problem.The interconnectedness...
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Why It's Critical to Add a Cleanliness Specification to Your Vendor Compliance Program
Supply chain control is crucial to ensuring that the time, money, and labor put into a production process don’t go to waste. Managing what comes into the production process has a massive impact on how effective and efficient the production process will ultimately be. For companies dealing with...
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What Does Surface Intelligence Look Like in Action?
Surface condition is a significant driver of process and product reliability. It affects every part of the product life cycle, from development to launch, and its impact continues for as long as the product remains in service.
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Top 6 Reasons Your Internal Organization Should Care About Surface Intelligence
Intelligence is a funny thing. On its face, it seems like the best way to gauge intelligence is to measure one's capacity for maximum knowledge intake through rote memorization of facts and figures. That sounds good, but it doesn't feel quite right. Because we all know knowledge that's just piled...
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Boost New Product Innovation Using Materials Science and Technology
Having the freedom to design and build to the limits of our imaginations is at the core of what makes us human. You must think outside the common practice to boost innovation and improve processes to accomplish this task.
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The Best Way to Qualify a Wash Method for Your Manufacturing Process
Parts washers are heavy-duty, hardworking machines that have become irreplaceable staples in automotive andmachined part manufacturing processes. As manufacturing processes have become more sophisticated, the industries using parts washers have expanded to includenot only industrial metals and...
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4 Critical Questions to Consider When Assessing Risks in New Product Development
There are numerous obstacles to achieving and then maintaining a clean material surface. But there is one element that carries through the entire product lifecycle and can have a massive impact on the adhesion performance of the final product: TIME.
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Why You Should Implement a Surface Cleanliness Specification Using Contact Angle
When cleaning invisible contaminants from a surface, you may ask yourself, "How do I know when the surface is clean, or how clean, is clean enough?" These are common questions that product development teams ask when developing new products that require surfaces to be thoroughly cleaned in order to...
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Surface Analyst Diagnoses Critical Cleaning Issue of Defense Weaponry Components
Brighton Science's Surface Analyst was featured in a Finishing & Coating article where Hubbard-Hall used the handheld technology to diagnose a $1 million dollar problem for a manufacturer that extrudes aluminum tubes as part of two individual missile systems: an armor piercing air to surface...
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What is Materials Science & Why is it Crucial for New Product Development?
Many people are not familiar with the subject matter and discipline of materials science because it’s not taught in elementary or high school and only infrequently at the university level. Instead, we are often taught chemistry and physics. Chemistry teaches us how atoms and molecules interact,...
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Fail Early, Fail Often: How Predictive Modeling Allows Teams To Quickly Assess And Correct Adhesion Failure In Product Development
What Does 'Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Intelligently' Even Mean? When it comes to business and innovation, making mistakes is inevitable. But instead of shying away from failure, we should embrace it as an opportunity to learn and grow. This concept is often referred to as "fail fast, fail often,...
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Does Surface Roughness Impact Contact Angle Measurements?
When measuring and quantifying surface energy, a common question arises: "Does surface roughness impact contact angle measurements obtained by the Surface Analyst?" In response, Surface Intelligence experts at Brighton Science launched a research project to determine whether contact angle...
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How to Measure Contact Angle on Convex and Concave Surfaces
Historically, accurately measuring contact angles on concave and convex surfaces has been a challenge. The typical method used to measure contact angle on these types of surfaces has been with abenchtop goniometer. The challenges arise from the way goniometers measurecontact angle—from a...
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Why Creating a Surface Intelligence Center of Excellence is Crucial for Manufacturing
As manufacturing becomes more complex and the globalization of supply chains increases, the need for a Surface Intelligence Center of Excellence grows. Such a center would compile data, training, and best practices from across the business to identify areas where further efficiency and quality...
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Guess the Contact Angle: Plasma Treated Aluminum
So far in our Guess the Contact Angle Series, we have brought you three videos demonstrating how contact angle changes depending on the state of the material surface: Contact angle measurement on a piece of aged, 'as is' aluminum Contact angle measurement on aluminum after cleaning it with an IPA...
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How to Achieve Reliable Manufacturing by Controlling Surface Quality
When a material begins its journey through a manufacturing process, it becomes crucial to know and control everything that happens to that material as it makes its way down the line. There are two major factors to consider when understanding and controlling what happens to the surface of that...
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How Surface Intelligence Enables Data-Driven Decision-Making & Advances Business Growth
Formula 1 teams know that you must incorporate a tried-and-true process into your workflow to perform at the highest level. They practice a defined, repeatable, measured, tested, and continuously improve their processes to ensure that their level of performance is constantly increasing. This can be...
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What Is the Role of Surface Chemistry in Industry?
Manufacturing has become increasingly complex with the fusion of technologies that are blurring distinctions between the digital, physical, and biological worlds. Physical products and services have transformed significantly due to enhancements made possible by digital capabilities. New...
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How to Bring Reliability to Complex Aspects of Material Engineering
Materials science and engineering influence our lives daily and open the door to new innovations in manufacturing. Each time you wear pair of shoes, scroll on your smart device or use a golf club, you are interacting with a product that was produced using materials, adhesives, and coatings that...
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How to Quickly Qualify Suppliers and Make Changes with Confidence
Materials used to manufacture increasingly advanced and complex products have likewise evolved to be equally advanced and complex. As a result, it has become critical to understand the surfaces of these materials in order to optimize their ability to accept various paints, films, coatings, and...
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The Benefits of Benchmarking Surface Quality in Manufacturing
Certainty is the goal of every manufacturing process. Manufacturers need to have total confidence that every aspect of their production process will go according to plan. The adhesion process needs to be controlled just like any other production operation, with accuracy and ongoing monitoring....
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Does Your Organization Take A Holistic Approach to Innovation?
Innovation can be a scary thing. For companies built on order, predictability, and success, innovation can be unsettling. It can be messy, unpredictable, and prone to failure before producing a demonstrable payback. But innovation is vital. Without it, there can be no evolutionary growth or...
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How to Conceptualize and Design Products Using New Materials and Substrates with Confidence
Materials as technology is one of the most important fields in developmental science. As new materials are created and perfected, they proliferate and quickly spread to manufacturing centers around the world, spurring innovative product design. The rapid development of ceramic, sustainable...
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Why Automotive Glass Bonding Recalls Should be a Thing of the Past
Automotive glass is a technological marvel. Despite its clarity, there is a lot that is unseen by the average driver. Silica compounds, tempering, and lamination all combine to create one of the most critical components of today’s motor vehicles. Unfortunately, though, things periodically go wrong...
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How to Use Surface Intelligence Data to Build Smart Prototypes and Rapidly Pilot Manufacturing Lines
Since the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing has been evolving, periodically marked by significant, fundamental changes such as the introduction of mechanization, mass production through assembly lines, and computerization. Today, we are witnessing what experts are calling Industry 4.0 – a period...
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The Solution to Costly Aircraft Paint Adhesion Failure
The importance of understanding surface quality and being able to measure it in an accurate, reliable, and demonstrable way is important for ensuring a high-quality finish and, ultimately, a high-quality product. Any manufacturer that is not able to do this increases their risk of producing...
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How to Get Help Finding the Root Cause of Adhesion Failure in Manufacturing
Adhesion, coating, and bonding problems have a tendency to be persistent and resilient, causing frustration and can lead to costly rework, recalls, scrap, production delays, and reputation loss, at worst. These problems often require more than manufacturers are currently equipped to handle on their...
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Guess the Contact Angle: Abraded Aluminum
So far, in our Guess the Contact Angle Series, we have brought you two videos: the first one shows the Surface Analyst taking a contact angle measurement on a piece of aged, 'as is' aluminum. The second video asks you to guess the contact angle after we took the same piece of aluminum but cleaned...
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The Surface Analyst™ Instantly Measures Contact Angle to Determine the Potential Adhesive Strength of Bonds
A Handheld Solution for Verifying Surface Cleanliness The Surface Analyst™ is an innovative handheld solution for use in the lab and on the factory floor. It reduces waste, rework, and recalls when poorly prepared substrate surfaces lead to bonding, coating, sealing, painting, or printing failure.
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Meet Brighton Science's Chief Scientist, Giles Dillingham
A Deep History in Materials Science Founder and Chief Scientist of Brighton Science, Dr. Giles Dillingham's fascination with the connections between the invisible (the molecular structure of the world around us) and the perceivable (the properties and behavior of materials and objects) stems from a...
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Top Challenges Product Development Teams Experience When Bringing a Product Concept to Manufacturing
Modern product development is fraught with challenges due in large part to the sophistication and complexity of the various elements that go into a final product – everything from materials and surface geometries to coatings, bonding, and even staff skills and competencies. Pitfalls await even the...
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BTG Labs evolves capabilities, leadership and name to become Brighton Science—bringing unmatched expertise to the emerging field of Surface Intelligence.
BTG Labs, a company that has spent the past 20 years solving critical adhesion issues and developing the world’s first surface inspection technology for leading manufacturers, has evolved its capabilities, leadership and name to become Brighton Science.
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Why Manufacturers Can’t Achieve Manufacturing Innovation Gains by Simply Purchasing Equipment
Innovation is a word you hear tossed around frequently in various industries. Many organizations pursue innovation relentlessly as the key to their success and to gaining or maintaining a competitive edge. But innovation can be elusive for organizations that don’t quite know how to support it. As a...
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Using an XPS to Understand Surfaces Critical to Adhesion
In today’s blog post, we’ll be highlighting our lab’s capabilities. With the help of Rose Roberts, Ph.D., Senior Custom Applications and Materials Engineer, we’ll complete an overview of our x-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS), one of our more complex tools, and how we use it to research the...
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Top 5 Trends in Products & Manufacturing Today
Change is perhaps the one absolute constant in manufacturing. Developments - in materials, processes, machinery, testing, products, markets, and thousands of other things that affect manufacturing companies - happen every day.
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Guess the Contact Angle: IPA Wiped Aluminum
As part of the Guess the Contact Angle series, we have brought you a new video that highlights best practices when cleaning material surfaces with IPA wipes and we will ask you to "guess" the contact angle measurement after the surface has been cleaned. The contact angle featured in this demo is...
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Data-informed Use of Contact Angle Measurements Minimize the Risk of Making the Wrong Decision about Product Quality
Deciding whether to reject a part or not based on a quality measurement always carries with it a finite risk: you could unknowingly decide that a perfectly good part is actually bad (a Type 1 error), or you might incorrectly conclude that a bad part is actually good (a Type 2 error). There is a...
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Leveraging the Variability in Contact Angle Measurements to Improve Surface Quality and Process Control
Determining whether your material surface has been adequately cleaned or prepared for bonding, coating, sealing, painting, or printing requires the ability to objectively quantify the chemical and physical characteristics of the top few molecular layers: this is where all the action is. Water...
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Can Contact Angle Quantitatively Measure Total Surface Energy?
In an article published in the Journal of Adhesion Science and Technology, "Water Contact Angle as a Quantitative Measure of Total Polyethylene Surface Energy" Materials Scientists from Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) explain the validity of water contact angle as a measurement for total ...
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Eliminate Surface Engineering Challenges & Design with Freedom
Oftentimes, to boost innovation and improve processes, you have to think outside the common practice. You have to take the restraints off of creativity. Freedom to design and build to the limits of our imaginations is at the core of what makes us human.
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How to Master Industrial Adhesion with Scientific Predictability
Manufacturers who produce products with surfaces that require paints, adhesives, or sealants face a challenge in determining the quality and reliability of the final product. The problem is often caused by the fact that most manufacturers don’t have complete control over three critical elements of...
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How Manufacturers Can Optimize the Effectiveness of Plasma Activation
In last week’s blog post, Using Plasma for Surface Cleaning and Activation, Rose Roberts, Ph.D., Brighton Science's (formerly BTG Labs) Senior Custom Applications and Materials Engineer, discussed how to use plasma for the dual purposes of cleaning critical surfaces and activating critical surfaces...
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Using Plasma for Surface Cleaning and Activation
This blog post is the first of a two-part series focusing on plasma. With the help of Rose Roberts, Ph.D., Senior Custom Applications and Materials Engineer, we will review plasma basics and discuss how plasma can be used for both cleaning and surface activation. We will also touch upon the...
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Surface Quality Measurements Enable Plating and Coating Chemistry Suppliers to Guarantee Quality to Their Customers
Automotive supply chains are complex. Nearly 78 million vehicles were manufactured in 2020. Each vehicle may have upwards of 30,000 individual parts. Automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) need to manage billions of parts annually. If any of these parts fail, vehicle performance is...
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Quantifying the Effectiveness of High Volume Metal Cleaning in Fresh and Aged Baths
In today’s video, we will show you how to quantify the surface quality of metals when using fresh and aged baths. We will demonstrate how Water Contact Angle (WCA) measurements can provide feedback in less than two seconds on the effectiveness of your cleaning process and will enable you to improve...
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What Are Material Handling Best Practices to Keep Surfaces Clean?
Does your business, or your customer’s business, deal with adhesion – either in the form of bonding, coating, sealing, printing, or painting? Given that these processes may be occurring either upstream or downstream, does everyone in your organization share a common understanding and appreciation...
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Guess the Contact Angle: Aged 'as is' Aluminum
In today’s blog post, we are going to have a bit of fun using video to learn more about contact angles. We will show you a contact angle and will ask you to “guess” the contact angle measurement. The contact angle featured in this demo is formed by a water droplet deposited on a piece of ‘as is’...
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What to do When Your Contact Angle is out of Spec
Adhesive bonding can be used to create strong, reliable assemblies that perform extraordinarily well in the field. Adhesive bonding is a deceptively sophisticated process that is frequently used in complex manufacturing environments. It is imperative to take a holistic view of each step in a...
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Harnessing the Power of Water to Achieve Precise Results
Nature is miraculous. Living entities, be they plants, animals, marine life, or humans, can perform an amazing array of complex tasks. As scientists, inventors, and engineers, we take inspiration from any source that provides a good idea.
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Why You Should Rethink Your Manufacturing Cleaning Process
In manufacturing, a final assembly is only as reliable as its constituent parts, the bonding or joining method used to hold them together, or the coating method used for corrosion protection and/or the final aesthetic touch. In order to guarantee the strength and successful performance of a...
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The Best Method of Measuring Contact Angles for Reliable Manufacturing Processes
"Materials Science" sounds niche and even a little peculiar, but no manufacturer is a stranger to the implications of material science principles for building reliable products. Materials react with one another. Material properties impact how these interactions occur. Accurately anticipating and...
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Why Knowing Water Contact Angle is Important for Successful Adhesive Performance
Adhesives are an integral part of modern manufacturing, but choosing the right adhesive is only one part of the equation. It’s well known that you won’t get a reliable bond with an adhesive if you just slap the adhesive onto your material without doing anything to prepare that surface. What ISN’T...
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How to Avoid Polymeric Coating Failure Which Leads to Corrosion in Materials
These days, if you see a painted product, it is likely a polymer-based coating providing a striking and powerful barrier between the underlying material and elements in the atmosphere that want to corrode that material. Polymer coating technology has advanced tremendously in the last decade....
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What are Surfactants and How Do They Impact Surface Tension?
In recent articles, we’ve discussed what surface tension and surface energy are. Manufacturers need to acquaint themselves with these concepts because controlling surface quality through surface energy measurement of solid materials is the most predictive method of ensuring high-performance bonds...
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What is the Difference Between Surface Free Energy and Surface Energy?
When it comes down to it, this is another purely semantic question, much like the one we dealt with in another article comparing the terms “surface tension” and “surface energy.” Surface-free energy is free energy in a particular space - the surfaces of materials. Free energy, in its most...
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How to Measure Surface Tension
The attractive force of the molecules present at the surface of a liquid towards each other is called the surface tension of that liquid. It may seem like a little thing (and in terms of mass, it doesn’t really get much smaller than the top few molecular layers that make up the surface of a liquid...
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What is the Difference Between Surface Tension and Surface Energy
Using adhesives in manufacturing is becoming increasingly common for building everything from massive machines to everyday tech devices. But companies' reliance on the science of adhesion to make sure their products work perfectly and look marvelous didn’t start there. In the centuries since the...
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Surface Energy Measurement is the Key to Process Control and High Performance
When manufacturing companies take adhesion seriously, it can have a remarkable effect on their ability to achieve their business goals. The key is to take a strategic look at adhesion processes early in product development.
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Why You Should Use Predictive Data in Building Material Manufacturing
Construction companies and the manufacturers who build the parts and materials that create buildings are relying on adhesives more than ever. When it comes to modern flooring, roofing, siding, windows, and wall construction, to make sure the outside stays out and the inside stays warm/cool/dry,...
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Maintaining Consistent Adhesion Quality for Shoe Manufacturers even with Material Changes
There are a lot of reasons why sneakerheads love the shoes they covet. Athletic shoes have become one of the most sought-after clothing items due to their aesthetic appeal but also because of the ever-evolving material innovations of shoe manufacturers.
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How Surface Sensitive Measurements Help Medical Device Manufacturers Avoid Regulatory Bottlenecks
The pathway to zero defect manufacturing through the implementation of quality control procedures is found right there in the name. Quality control requires the control of variables to ensure quality outcomes. But it’s the former that is beguiling to quality engineers.
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Reduce Field Repairs Through Zero Defect Manufacturing
Quality control isn’t about preventing just the most egregious failure possibilities. It’s about setting high standards so that products are reliable for years. Control of quality standards for adhesive bonding of dissimilar materials plays a massive role in not only ensuring recalls and warranty...
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How to Reduce Medical Device Surface Testing Time and Subjectivity
Time is always of the essence for medical device manufacturers. When a medical breakthrough needs to make it to market, there is no time to waste. There is also no margin for error. Medical device manufacturers are always working with doctors and scientists to experiment with profound new...
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Manufacturing Best Practices for Business Continuity Plans
Even though coming to the end of 2020 has not at all meant the end of the impact of Covid-19, manufacturers are pushing forward to make sure 2021 is not marred by the setbacks of this year. This has not been a normal economic downturn, and the ways to remain resilient in the past are not enough to...
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Better Consumer Electronics Reliability: Coatings and Adhesives
In a recent study conducted by Instrumental, the top ten most common manufacturing defects were examined. The number one defect that manufacturers fight against is a deficiency in glue.
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NASA and UVA Work with Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) to Co-Author Spectroscopy Journal Article
Brighton Science's Founder and Chief Scientist, Dr. Giles Dillingham, and Research and Development Chemist, Brooke Campbell recently collaborated with NASA scientists and researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia on an article published in...
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What is the Best Surface Quality Inspection for Smart Manufacturing?
Manufacturing processes can, on the surface, appear to be an amorphous web of convoluted conveyors and machinating machinery. But taking a closer look through the eyes of a quality engineer reveals that the process that leads to reliable products is, in fact, itself a series of decisions, each...
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Reliable Wire Bonding Through Quality Data Collection for Industry 4.0
Wire bonding and sintering are critical processes involved in the manufacture of a majority of electronic devices. These processes are used to connect silicon chips, integrated circuits (ICs), and electrical components to their housings and boards.
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What Medical Device Manufacturers Need From Surface Cleanliness Testing
Quality tests during medical device production need to check a lot of boxes for manufacturers. Testing must increase confidence in product reliability in order to be worthwhile to manufacturers. What’s more, that confidence needs to be measurable and reportable because companies cannot tolerate...
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A Great Idea to Help Save the Aerospace Industry
2020 is a year that will live in infamy for many industries. We haven't even seen the full effect of Covid-19 on economies, which inserts a heap of uncertainty into decision-making for manufacturers. But one thing is for sure: we're not going to get back to business as usual anytime soon. The ...
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Everything Breaks: What Reliability Means for Adhesively Bonded Products
The seemingly easy and obvious answer to the question implied in the title of this article is: reliability means no failures whatsoever forever and ever, amen. Sadly, it’s not quite so simple.
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Where to Look to Achieve Operational Visibility in Manufacturing
Enterprise manufacturing operations comprise interlocking, overlapping, and critically interdependent processes. Each process in this symbiotic web consists of a series of steps that are only successful when the invisible details are unshrouded and subject to quantitative quality parameters.
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Effective Strategies for Efficient and Reliable Manufacturing That Can’t Wait
Today, manufacturing requires a paradigm shift from reactionary whack-a-mole problem correction to taking a holistic approach. The mutually reliant elements of manufacturing are interwoven in both obvious and invisible ways. From supply chain communication to equipment dependability and from ...
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The Huge Need for Zero Defect, Large Scale Molding Processes
Manufacturing large-scale molded products such as pools, boats, and aircraft parts is as herculean a process as the products they generate. Colossal molds are used to form fiberglass and other composites into aircraft wing panels, fuselages, boat hulls, bus shells, and pools.
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Process Control Innovations for Card Manufacturers
We’ve all experienced the disappointing (and kinda embarrassing) moment when we’re at a register trying to buy armfuls of tortilla chips and salsa, and the point-of-sale card reader screams out that an error has occurred.
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The Best Method of Controlling HMDS Use in Semiconductor Manufacturing
Semiconductors are one of the most fascinating areas of electronics manufacturing. The ability to “grow” almost irreducibly small integrated circuit components on silicon wafers has made an incredible amount of micronization possible. The theory has always been that as the chips got smaller, their...
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Surface Preparation for Reliable Optical Coatings in Photonics Manufacturing
Coatings are an indispensable part of manufacturing photonics. The coatings help determine the most basic functionality of the lenses they are applied to. How much light passes through, what happens to that light when it passes through the lens, does some light get absorbed, and are some spectral...
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Ensuring the Durability of Oleophobic Coatings on Consumer Tech
We’re all thinking a lot more about the surfaces we touch and the invisible things that might be on those surfaces. Manufacturers have been thinking about how surfaces interact with our skin and the environment long before COVID-19 made us all much more cognizant of what we can get from touching...
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Using Data to Improve Ink Adhesion to Polymer Film
One of the most frustrating aspects of experiencing a problem in manufacturing isn't necessarily the issue itself, but rather, it's the difficulty of accurately determining and communicating what the problem actually is.
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How to Get a Stronger Weld Through Cleaning
Even though we look around us and see plastic everywhere, in every shape and imaginable application, metals are still a more commonly used raw material in machined products. Metals are the legacy material of choice due to their strength and relative ease of bonding but advances in polymers are...
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3 Things You Need to Know to Create Strong, Reliable Bonds With Laser Cleaning
Manufacturers are always looking to create stronger, more durable, more reliable, and in the automotive and aerospace sectors, lightweight products. In this pursuit, they’ve often upgraded and swapped out material systems for metal alloys that have a lower density, better temperature tolerance, and...
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How to Know if Hydrophilic Coatings on Medical Devices Provide the Necessary Comfort for Patients
Comfort is more than just a nice thing to hope for when it comes to medical devices like tubing, catheters and stents that are implanted into the human body. Comfort, in this instance, refers to the absence of pain. Having a piece of plastic or metal inserted into your body is never going to feel...
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How to Control Surface Quality for Bonding Dissimilar Materials
We’ve mentioned many times in various articles that bonded material systems are becoming the norm for manufacturers in nearly every industry. In order to make finished products more efficient in terms of weight, cut material costs, accommodate more automated processes, lessen the need for repairs...
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COVID-19 Makes Remote Quality Monitoring Crucial for Manufacturers
Since COVID-19 has reshaped the economic landscape for the foreseeable future and there are many questions about how to safely and effectively respond to it, now is a good time for manufacturers to consider how to make the best of our “new normal” if they haven’t already done so in earnest.
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How to Bond Fiber Reinforced Plastics for Harsh Environments
Many manufacturers have a dual performance concern when their products are out there in the world being used in whatever capacity they were designed for. These parallel interests are: how to maintain the appearance and how to guarantee structural integrity through common usage of the products.
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Coatings on Car Sensors and Why We Don’t Have Driverless Cars Yet
Our relationship with our vehicles may have changed in the past few months, with the idea of commuting to work looking more like a shuffle to the desk across the room rather than a drive to the office across town. However, cars have not dropped from their prominence in our society.
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Controlling Parts Washing Methods for Medical Components
Cleanliness is next to production standardization requirements for medical device manufacturers (as the old saying goes). Devices built to be inserted within the human body understandably need to meet the highest cleanliness standards. Companies in this industry have already known what many of us...
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The Dangers of Missing Vital Surface Quality Information in Production
A major problem for manufacturers is the problem of sensitivity. There is a rampant lack of sensitivity to material surfaces for companies across every manufacturing industry. Granted, it’s not easy to test surface quality to predict the outcomes of common manufacturing processes like adhesive...
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Verification vs. Validation for Medical Device Product Quality Assurance
Validation and verification are inextricable from product development and process design for the manufacturing of medical devices. To satisfy regulatory standards, reduce risk, create efficiencies, and ensure outcomes, manufacturers have ever-evolving validation and verification procedures. New...
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How to Control Additive Blooming in Polymer Films
We all take the ease of peeling open and resealing packs of double-stuff Oreos for granted. The plastic packaging that maintains the freshness of our favorite snacks and foods has become so ubiquitous it doesn’t even register as existing until we try to open that hotdog pack with our bare hands or...
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The Best Way to Verify Medical Diagnostics Coatings
The biomedical industry runs on testing. Testing is at the heart of meeting extensive requirements to ensure healthcare practices and facilities are safe. A kind of testing that has been on all of our minds lately is the kind of testing that analyzes the presence of diseases. Often these tests...
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Single vs Multi-fluid Contact Angle Techniques Part 2: Why one fluid is all you need for process control in manufacturing
This is part two of a two-part series explaining Brighton Science's approach to helping companies build reliability into their cleaning and adhesion processes through consultation and implementation of novel inspection equipment. These two articles are based on this technical paper written by Dr....
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Single vs Multi-fluid Contact Angle Techniques Part 1: Surface energy and the attractions between substances
This is part one of a two-part series explaining the finer points of Brighton Science's approach to helping companies build reliability into their cleaning and adhesion processes through consultation and implementation of novel inspection equipment. These two articles are based on this technical...
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Will New Hand Washing Practices Cause Problems for Manufacturing?
Like many industries during the COVID-19 crisis, manufacturing has had to make big changes, including scaling back its workforce, enforcing new and intensified hygiene standards, and taking a closer look at workplace cleanliness. Looking ahead to the permanent adjustments we’re all making, it’s...
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Proposed ASTM Standard Will Ease the Pain of Manufacturers
An exciting development is taking place to make surface quality and cleanliness inspection technology more available to all manufacturers. We have collaborated with ASTM International and other stakeholders to craft a revision to establish a standard use of handheld goniometers in production...
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Demystifying the Greatest Metal Brazing Process Challenges
When thinking about what manufacturing looks like, most people envision sparks flying, metal clanking, and fires blazing. This isn’t too far off the mark since metals have been used for bonding joints together to build larger, sturdier, and more stable structures since before the first Industrial...
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How to Protect Overmolded Connectors for Medical Devices
Protective coverings are part and parcel of our lives these days. For industries reliant upon electronic components and connectors, protective coverings in the form of polymeric over-molding encapsulation need to remain sealed and impervious to the environment.
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Study Proves the Surface Analyst is Dependable for Process Control
One of our favorite services we provide to manufacturers is to help optimize surface preparation techniques for their particular materials and products. It’s our specialty and one of our biggest passions. We feel so strongly about it because we know that if you, as a manufacturer, are able to...
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How to Get the Most Out of Your Vacuum Plasma Treatment
Vacuum plasma is the treatment method of record for many manufacturers. Not only because it is a legacy technology proven useful over many, many decades but because it can be particularly effective at creating chemically reactive surfaces of various geometries that need to be bonded, coated,...
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How to Bond PTFE to Anything
Polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, is a very common material widely used in almost every major industry. This ultra-lubricious and multi-use fluoropolymer touches everyone from the aerospace and automotive industries (as an insulating cover on cabling) to musical instrument maintenance (it’s found...
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Covid-19: Biological vs. Chemical Contamination in Manufacturing
Lately, the whole world has seen variations of the same conversation. Whether the discussion centers on N95 masks, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, or what movies to watch while maintaining a safe social distance, the underlying concern is about cleanliness.
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Cleaning Strategies for Great Adhesion
Cleanliness in manufacturing gains avid devotees all the time. Once the importance of cleanliness is grasped, it’s nearly impossible to think about manufacturing processes without considering the pervasive impact cleanliness has on every aspect and feature of the process.
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Plasma Treatment for Complete and Reliable Cleaning with Richard Burke
At IPC APEX 2020 in San Diego, we wanted to explore the ways that electronics manufacturers, who encapsulate their circuit boards with a conformal coating, are cleaning their boards. What are the benefits to their current processes, and what are some things manufacturers could learn to make their...
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History of Cleaning for Ideal Electronics Manufacturing with Mike Konrad
At IPC APEX 2020 in San Diego, we got the chance to sit down and chat with Mike Konrad from Aqueous Technologies and the Reliability Matters podcast, a show about the reliability of circuit assemblies.
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Topcoat to Primer Surface Reliability for Aircraft Painting
Adhesion problems don’t have a preference when it comes to the kind of damage they cause. Whether the end result is structural or cosmetic, adhesion-related failure headaches for manufacturers abound. For aircraft OEMs, one of the most crucial aesthetic operations is the topcoat of paint, although...
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Surface Quality in Aircraft Sealing and Bonding for Repairs
When an aircraft is manufactured, every single portion of the plane or jet is designed to be able to be serviced and repaired for the next 20-30 years. Aircraft manufacturing OEMs are building aircraft with the expectation that extensive repairs will have to be done later down the road. This is an...
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Why Surface Cleanliness is Crucial for Electronic PCBs
Defining “clean” is actually more complicated than it sounds. Cleanliness can be in the eye of the beholder (I mean, we all had a college roommate who swore they were tidy, but let’s be honest…), and it can also be calculated and precisely managed to the nth degree. In regard to PCB cleanliness for
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Formed In Place Gasket (FIPG) Reliability Starts with the Surface
Form-in-place-gaskets (FIPG) have been a revolutionary advancement in industries that bank on high-reliability sealing applications. FIPG is a versatile sealing technique that deploys a mostly silicone (they can sometimes be blended with metals like silver, aluminum, and nickel for conductivity...
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Surface Preparation for Primer Coating of Composites in Aerospace Applications
A lot goes into painting an aircraft. This massive, multi-stage process begins long before that final, shiny topcoat you see on the wings and tail is applied. The components are molded, then they’re prepared (which is often a multi-step process in-and-of-itself), then they’re assembled, then there...
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Conformal Coating Failure Caused by Poor Surface Cleanliness
Electronic components consist of many exposed and delicate pieces that leave them vulnerable. A lot is relying on these fragile parts to function without fail. From implantable medical devices to navigational equipment and from sensor packages in cars to cell phones, the manufacturers of electronic...
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Importance of Adhesion & Composites in Lightweighting Cars
One of the most pressing questions on the minds of manufacturing engineers is how to take a load off. Lightweighting, or shedding pounds on assembled vehicles and machinery, is a critical puzzle in aerospace, marine, and, most acutely, automotive industries. In fact, with the pressure to optimize...
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Is Roughness as Important as Surface Cleanliness to Adhesion?
When the subject of material surfaces comes up among manufacturing engineers, the discussion usually centers on the physical attributes of that surface, the surface topography or morphology, or more simply - the surface roughness. Preparing material surfaces for assembly, coating, painting, or...
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Surface Treatment of Thermoplastics for Aerospace Components
The Aerospace and Defense Industry is experiencing a market boom right now. Investments in the aerospace industry are an increasingly significant part of the world economy. Last year, almost $1 trillion was spent worldwide, with about $400 billion spent directly on aircraft and space systems...
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The Tools & Skills to Address Adhesion Problems in Production
When adhesion issues become apparent in a manufacturing process, they can seem to come out of nowhere. When coatings on circuit boards delaminate and cause shorts, when automotive glass doesn’t properly seal and moisture is let through, or when implantable medical devices aren’t meeting cleanliness...
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The 3 Crucial Elements for High-Performance Adhesion in Manufacturing
Excellent adhesion relies on the manufacturer’s ability to understand and control three distinct yet interrelated elements. In manufacturing, adhesive bonding takes many forms, but the fundamental principles of adhesion are always the same. Even if the application is metal joint welding, Parylene...
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New Solutions to Address Adhesion Failures in Manufacturing
In order to create predictable adhesion outcomes in manufacturing, precision is key. When thinking about the success of a bonding, printing, coating, sealing, painting or cleaning application, manufacturers need a new perspective. Manufacturers need an approach that considers the entire adhesion...
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Best-practice Surface Preparation Processes for New Products
New Product Development is an essential component to the successful growth of companies that always challenge themselves to improve and innovate. Getting this design stage right is pivotal in that it sets in motion everything the product will be and how well it will perform.
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What are the Primary Causes of Chronic Adhesion Failures?
Adhesion problems have a tendency to show up in a manufacturing process and then overstay their welcome. The chronic nature of so many adhesion issues is due to factors that many manufacturing companies are oblivious to. That’s not to fault the manufacturers. Until recently, there hasn’t been a...
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How to Minimize Production Scrap from Adhesion Failures
In manufacturing, it is extremely difficult to eliminate all inefficiencies and production deficits. It is not uncommon for setbacks to occur in the form of scrap and rework due to product failure before the product is shipped to the market or recalls and returns after the product has already been...
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How to Ensure a Manufacturing Surface is Clean Enough for Adhesion
Cleanliness and adhesion go hand-in-hand. If you’re looking for an adhesion process to be successful, then you are also absolutely interested in cleaning the materials involved in the application. In order to get the most out of your cleaning operations, it’s imperative to know three things: What...
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How to Know if a Manufacturing Surface is Treated or Untreated
In order to ensure successful bonding, coating, printing, painting, laminating or meet cleanliness standards in manufacturing, material surfaces must be manipulated. One such manipulation that gets surfaces ever closer to being ready for adhesion is surface treatment. There are many operations and...
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How Surface Quality Devices Can Validate Adhesion Specs
Regulatory specifications in manufacturing exist to ensure that the highest quality, safest, and most useful products are created. These are devised internally through research and development testing to meet customer demands and through external regulatory bodies to protect consumers and public...
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How to Transfer a Lab Surface Treatment Process to Production
Production processes don’t just materialize fully formed on the manufacturing floor. Procedures and operations go through a full research and development cycle, which can take years before they are integrated into the production line. This pre-production work includes strength, reliability, and...
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4 Manufacturing Process Gaps that Create Adhesion Problems
Process gaps emerge in production processes any time manufacturers do not have all the information they need to make decisions that will prevent or solve adhesion problems. Often these gaps are the result of oversights; however, sometimes they can exist and be difficult to detect because they only...
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Can a Surface Science Lab Ensure Adhesion in Manufacturing?
Manufacturers utilize research and design laboratories all the time. To scale new products up to the production line, years of toiling in testing labs are done to ensure that everything goes off without a hitch once production starts.
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Secrets to Predicting Adhesion Failures in Production
When adhesion failure becomes apparent in manufacturing processes, it can seem to come out of nowhere. Very often, there is no problem until suddenly there is. It feels unpredictable, unavoidable, and like the best solution is to either eat the loss it brings or just hope it goes away as quickly...
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Why a Surface Quality Inspection Process Ensures Adhesion
Manufacturing processes that involve bonding, coating, sealing, printing, painting, laminating, or cleaning need a metric to measure the surface quality of the materials involved. Without such a metric, it is impossible to predict whether the adhesion process will be successful or if it's on the...
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7 Most Valuable Tips to Ensure Proper Adhesion in Production
Adhesion problems are an insidious concern to manufacturers in any industry with printing, painting, bonding, laminating, or coating applications. These problems settle into a production process, and they manifest in many different ways. An adhesion issue could look like a joint failure, uneven...
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An Experts' Guide to Create a Surface Quality Specification
Various industries have different names for ways they change material surfaces during a production process. In medical fields and other industries dealing with high-reliability polymers, they’ll refer to the treatment of materials. In the automotive and machining sectors, the word used is often ...
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New and Better Surface Quality Test Than the Water Break
There are times when trying to discern if adhesion in manufacturing will succeed seems like a deeply mysterious and opaque puzzle. The water break test is a simple and fairly straightforward method of detecting hydrophobic (water-repellant) contaminants on surfaces, most commonly on flat sheets of...
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Easy Ways to Find Manufacturing Adhesion Failure Sources
When adhesion failure plagues a manufacturing process, it can be particularly disruptive. A production process may be humming along just fine, and then it suddenly becomes clear that a coating is uneven, or paint is chipping (when it wasn’t before), joints are weaker than they had been, or film is...
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How to Fix Common Causes of Adhesion Problems
Manufacturers often have a large blind spot when it comes to the causes of adhesion problems. This blind spot makes it impossible to solve these problems and generates frustration and loss rather than productivity and adhesion success. Taking the blinders off and taking on adhesion failure at its...
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10 Most Common Surface Quality Mistakes by Manufacturers
Manufacturers are constantly fighting against adhesion problems. Surfaces not sticking and adhesives not working is the daily reality facing manufacturers looking to make high-quality, reliable products. The daunting nature of the task of eliminating adhesion failure seems insurmountable and...
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Don’t Forget the Surface of Microelectronics
It’s easy to be dazzled by the advancements in electronic and medical devices that are constantly being made and discovered, allowing manufacturers to work on increasingly micro levels. Smaller tech means greater efficiency and higher production rates, which can lead to lower prices and more...
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How To Keep Up With the Changing Landscape of Advanced Materials
There's a logical fallacy akin to a "what's good for one is good for all" mindset that is devastating when applied to surface treatment in adhesion processes. Polymers are rapidly being developed and synthesized for niche applications to push the limits of the current physical properties of...
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When it comes to low water contact angles, the Surface Analyst “means” business
The desktop goniometer is a widely-used and accepted method of obtaining surface energy measurements of materials in the lab setting. For those unfamiliar, the goniometer uses the “profile-view method,” with the water contact angle obtained optically as viewed from the side. This method effectively...
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Deck the Hulls: Preparing Ship Hulls for Coating and Painting
Manufacturing a product to withstand the environmental stresses of wind, rain, and sediment is challenging enough. But, when you add saltwater and wave action to the mix, the detrimental threat of corrosion increases significantly. A coating adhesion test is important for quickly testing a surface...
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On the Surface: An Overview of Surface Types and Measurement Challenges in Manufacturing
Of all the challenges manufacturers face, creating and optimizing critical surface processes for various materials can be very difficult. Traits such as location, size, shape, and texture can add to the challenge. The success of any critical surface process requires an in-line, fast, easy, and...
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Guaranteeing Anti-fog Coating Application on Automotive Headlights
The competitive nature of the automotive industry requires manufacturers to engineer the ideal product; failures, no matter how small, are unacceptable and can bring heavy consequences.
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Teflon: More Than Just Pots and Pans
Teflon is a household name that commonly invokes images of eggs sizzling on a skillet, spatulas flipping pancakes, or rice steaming in a pan. But there is much more to this magical non-stick coating.
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Tales from Brighton Science's Materials & Processing Lab
In the Brighton Science Materials and Processing Laboratory, magic happens. Or, at least, it seems that way. In the lab, our specialists see the unseen. They use expertise, specialized tools, and data to reveal the invisible.
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A Beer with Brighton Science's Founder, Giles Dillingham
Image above: In 1987, Giles earned his Ph.D. and moved to Midland, Michigan, to begin laboratory work at Dow Chemical.
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Optimizing your Metal Performance with the Surface Analyst
Manufacturers who work with metal and are concerned with metal performance are all too familiar with the obstacles that come along with coating, painting, bonding, printing, or sealing it. While the uses of metal in manufacturing are countless and exist in numerous industries, the common...
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Surface Treatment Processes: Flame Treatment
Flame treatment is a surface activation treatment process used to chemically modify a surface for better adhesion. This process is typically used on low-energy surfaces that can be difficult to adhere to, such as plastics and composites. The treatment is also very gentle, posing low risk to the...
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Brighton Science's Exceptional Lab: Experts in Advanced Materials and Processes
Brighton Science Lab Capabilities The history of Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) is rooted in adhesion research. Originally a development lab, Brighton Science specialized in plasma polymerized coatings. The engineers worked with coatings containing corrosion-resistant and anti-microbial...
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CMH-17 Composite Materials Handbook: Validating Surface Preparation
Ongoing Advancements in the Field of Composite Materials Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) maintains an important connection to CMH-17, the Composite Materials Handbook. Brighton Science's special connection began in 2004 when Giles Dillingham, Founder and Chief Scientist, read that CMH-17...
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Gage Reproducibility and Repeatability (R&R) of the Surface Analyst™
Obtaining Quality and Consistency with the Surface Analyst Brighton Science's Surface Analyst™ uses a micro-liter of highly purified water to quantifiably measure contact angle. This objective measurement enables any user to obtain accurate results in either a pass/fail rating or a contact angle...
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Automotive Series: Surface Preparation of Composite Surfaces
Building a More Fuel-Efficient Automobile The pursuit of producing a more fuel-efficient automobile does not rely solely on the efficiency of the engine. A great amount of fuel efficiency gains are possible not because of improvements to engine design but because of improvements in materials....
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Common Surface Energy Tests: Dyne Inks
For years, manufacturers have implemented a conventional method of testing surface energy using a solution called dyne inks. Dyne ink, when applied to a surface, can reveal the surface's adhesion potential. But there's an inherent problem with the inks themselves...
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Contact Angle Analysis: Sealing Surface of Aluminum Castings
Surface Quality Requirements of Aluminum Castings Automotive manufacturers widely utilize aluminum castings as the most successful way to create aluminum parts. However, this process can involve inorganic contaminants on the surface, which interfere with potential bonding, sealing, or coating....
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Automotive Applications Series: Polymer Painting and Bonding in Automotive Manufacturing
Polymers are some of the most common base materials used in automotive parts. Polypropelenes, Polyolefins, and ABS plastics are used in dashboards, door panels, bumper fascias, liftgates, sensors, and increasingly exterior doors and fenders. A polymer is a low surface energy material that typically...
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The Surface Analyst's™ Unique Method of Measuring Water Contact Angle
Fluid Deposition Style of Contact Angle Measurements Measuring the contact angle of a fluid on a surface provides a sensitive and accurate reading of surface energy. However, methods of depositing the droplet and measuring the contact angle vary. Common surface measurement instruments, such as...
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Automotive Applications Series: Evaluating Surface Preparation for the Automotive Industry
Automotive manufacturers who bond, seal, coat, paint, or print now have a reliable way to verify the cleanliness of their surfaces.
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Automotive Applications Series: Ensuring Success for Formed-In-Place Gasket (FIPG) Applications
Controlling Surface Condition in FIPG Application Increasingly, FIPG processes are replacing traditional gaskets for a variety of automotive applications, such as air filters, oil filters, door panels, and external engine parts. The advantages include cheaper material cost, higher throughput...
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Contact Angle Measurements on Oxidized Polymer Surfaces Containing Water-Soluble Species
When Polymer Surfaces are Not Easily Accessible A collaboration between Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) and 3M scientists demonstrates that the Surface Analyst™ can provide receding contact angles. These contact angles precisely match the Wilhelmy-balance values, but in seconds instead of...
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