Everything about Viessmann Manufacturing Company Inc. is efficient, and while clean lines and minimalist design have always been part of its signature style, this innovative leader in heating solutions has just added to its traditional offering with a crisply designed, range of boilers engineered to suit even the most demanding modern lifestyle.

The company’s product design is every bit as slick as its technology. The new boiler design “matches the philosophy of everything we do. Whether it’s a boiler, a presentation, or software, we keep things very simple, sophisticated, and functional,” says Benjamin Jewell, Product Line Manager for North America. Whether these boilers are installed in purpose-built spaces or into smaller living arrangements, they blend into their surroundings effortlessly.

Choosing any Viessmann product is about a lot more than heating or hot water. Every product comes with the company’s service backed by its knowledge base with dedicated instructors at training facilities guiding installation contractors. Its Canadian office is also home to its engineering and controls departments and a CSA Group-certified testing laboratory.

The Vitodens wall-mounted high-efficiency boiler range comes standard ready for high altitude natural or propane gas installation and carefully blends the best new technology with dependability to create the company’s most efficient, reliable, low-maintenance, and intuitive Vitodens unit to date.

“From a volume perspective, the current models of our Vitodens wall-hung residential boilers are our most popular products, and we are excited to be launching our new versions of these models, including a few additional sizes, in July 2021. We are expecting these new models to be equally, if not more popular,” says Sandra Folleville, Marketing Manager.

The company’s new Vitodens 100-W B1HE and B1KE models (85 to 199 MBH) as well as the Vitodens 200 range (85 to 199 MBH) all come complete with new design elements like the Diamond Edge and Vitopearl White finish and several technological features. These boilers are all less expensive to run thanks to a sophisticated electronics platform and its most refined combustion platform yet, Lambda ProPlus. There are also installation benefits, automatic gas adjustment, natural gas to propane switching by pressing a button, automatic vent length adjustment, and software altitude adjustment. These features all allow for smooth installation, making calibration processes, hardware changes, switch adjustments, and specialty equipment obsolete during commissioning.

A new human-machine interface gives homeowners and end-users easy access to information such as the boiler’s gas and electricity consumption in English, French Canadian, and Spanish. Standard, integrated Wi-Fi offers connectivity to the company’s proprietary hydronic heating application, ViCare, available on both IOS and Android, and, because the new boilers also feature standard components of Viessmann’s existing range, servicing is easy.

Looking at the ViCare system, Jewell draws a comparison with systems on the market that have scheduling functionality on their thermostats. “Only about 60 percent of homes use the schedules that are available to them on smart thermostats. Smart thermostats are super common. But the percentage of people that use things like vacant modes, et cetera is really low,” he says. ViCare is different.

Viessmann created a technology that sets up schedules according to the temperature that users would like at certain times of the day. Manual schedules can be easily set up like on a thermostat, only this is a lot more user-centric, employing technologies such as geofencing on smartphones. This technology also switches the boiler from a preset Comfort temperature to an Eco temperature and back to create toasty warmth upon the user’s return. Being able to turn boiler temperatures down when not in use and on again in time for the user’s arrival makes a real difference to cost and energy savings.

The 100-series boilers offer a 3.5-inch display screen and the 200-series has a 7-inch color touch-screen similar to the latest smartphones to allow users to interact with the boilers. “It operates a lot like a cellphone. It allows for a more intuitive user interface. Both the 100 and 200-series’ interfaces also provide more information than we have historically done and quite a bit more than is common in the segment that we’re in,” says Jewell.

More specifically, the 200-series screen provides a range of messages from warnings and fault alerts to status messages letting users know exactly what is happening in the system. This function is a huge improvement on using codes or numbers that had users searching for the user manual or dialling a service technician for more information on what is happening with their boilers.

“Both [user] displays offer three languages. We [also] tend to embrace space, and that’s very much what you get with [our] boilers. The displays are beautiful and intuitive and very functional but disappear when you’re not interacting with them,” Jewell adds, noting that this makes the displays unobtrusive.

Vitodens 200-W B2HE is ideal for larger residences and offers the most applications yet, heating as many as three zones and up to four heating circuits simultaneously. Additional value add-ons include VitoGuide, ViCare, and ViPlan. Apart from providing users with comfort, the ViCare application also allows users to contribute to environmental protection effortlessly by saving energy with timing settings.

“The boilers have been around 95 to 98 percent efficiency for quite some time. As a manufacturer, we’ve invested quite a lot both from a research and development perspective and from a user study perspective. We have a pretty sophisticated [dedicated] user lab in Germany. Trying to understand what makes people happy and comfortable in the home as they interact with our products has allowed us to be a little bit more future-thinking,” says Jewell. “It’s one thing to be [nearly 100 percent] efficient but to make systems intuitive and easy so that contractors and users can use them more efficiently is where I think the Viessmann commitment shines.”

While minimally improving efficiency may not provide any huge immediate financial savings to homeowners, fuel and emissions savings for contractors who know exactly what they need to install the boilers, especially in remote locations, are real. Interchangeable parts take this saving even further, helping to improve overall efficiency tremendously. Time can now be used more effectively.

“It’s thinking outside of the box with regards to some of the efficiencies and green initiatives that are part of the overall system,” says Jerry Leyte, Director of Sales and Marketing.

COVID-19 proved that Viessmann cares about much more than only smart design. Since the beginning of the health crisis, every unit that the company dispatches is accompanied by two cloth ViCare-branded masks, for a total of around 10,000 masks. “We have customers buying multiple boilers. Some are giving them to homeowners who want them or to their own family members,” says Folleville of the masks, noting that the company has seen them around “on teenagers and homeowners who likely got them from a contractor.”

This is a close-knit team ready to serve. Company President Harald Prell recently received the Canadian Institute of Plumbing & Heating’s lifetime service award for forty years of service. However, his tenure at the company is even longer.

Adding to the Vitodens range, the Vitocrossal 200, CI2, (399 to 2000 MBH – one MBH is 1000 BTU per hour.) will be joining its collection later this year. This high-efficiency, light commercial boiler features new proprietary technology that promises to change how commercial boiler engineers specify projects in the future on both retrofit and the new construction market.

“The larger, commercial-model Vitodens boilers can be installed on a racking system in various configurations, as well as larger, floor-model, high-efficiency, condensing boilers that range from 1000 to 6000 MBH,” says Leyte.

Looking ahead, Viessmann has its aim firmly on connecting its entire supply chain to cloud technology to ensure that its customers and end-users enjoy the best user. “There is a future-proof experience behind all of the technologies,” Jewell says. After forty-one years, Viessmann Manufacturing Company, Inc. has the stability and long-term manufacturing expertise it takes to keep North America supplied with top-quality boilers for many years to come.

The post Turning Up the Heat<p class="company">Viessmann Manufacturing Company</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Johnston’s signature product is the highly efficient Scotch Marine fire-tube boiler. It features a water-backed construction design, meaning that all the surfaces are submerged in water, which reduces the refractory of the boiler, thereby creating higher efficiencies and reducing maintenance, both of which result in substantial cost savings for the user.

Johnston is the only company that designs and fabricates the entire customized package under one roof, including both the pressure vessel and the burner, which offers further cost savings to customers, while ensuring corners aren’t cut by a third-party manufacturer.

An environmentally friendly feature of a Johnston burner is its use of green technology. Johnston’s burners are specifically designed to offer reliable service with reduced nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide emissions to meet or exceed standards set by the EPA.

And last but not least, before each boiler is shipped to the customer, it is assembled and fire-tested at the plant to ensure it meets all of the requested specifications.

In addition to fire-tube boilers, Johnston also manufactures ancillary equipment, including a full line of deaerators, surge tanks, blowdown tanks, and blowdown heat recovery systems.

It was our pleasure to reconnect with Thom Parker, Johnston’s Director of Sales, after having first met with him in 2017. At that time, he told us about the company’s incredible history, but for this feature he prefers to focus on the present with just a glance into the future.

However, for the benefit of new Construction in Focus readers, here is a brief recap. In 1864, John Watt Johnston, a direct descendant of James Watt, the Scottish engineer who developed the steam engine in the 1770s, purchased the Turnbull Boiler Works in Ferrysburg on the banks of Michigan’s Grand River and quickly established its reputation as an industry leader. Johnston’s boilers were instrumental in rebuilding Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871 and 60 of them were used in building the Panama Canal at the turn of the 20^th century. It remained a family-owned company until 1974. In 1987 Johnston Boiler was purchased by Larry Hines, and today is part of the Hines Corporation.

In the 1990s when so many manufacturers closed their doors and moved offshore, Johnston stayed the course, and even reversed the trend by being in a position to sell boilers to offshore industries. Now Parker, as Director of Sales, is working with manufacturer’s representatives across North, Central and South America, Central America, the Middle East, and some African countries to sell those big green machines.

Although a non-disclosure agreement prevented him from speaking about it directly, he indicated he is currently working on a job for an off-shore energy sector company, and “if we get it, it will be the largest job in the history of our company.”

Johnston pioneered the Scotch Marine boiler system – a compact fire-tube design, originally intended for shipboard use, in sizes ranging from 50HP to 2500 HP – which is what Parker calls the “unsung hero” of industrial process manufacturing and health care sectors. Today food processors, distilleries, chemical manufacturers and resin manufacturers as well as hospitals and schools rely on this type of boiler, but no one notices them, he says, unless something goes wrong.

But thanks to the company’s focus on longevity and quality over quantity, things seldom go wrong with Johnston’s boilers. “We offer a 15-year warranty and follow up with customers for 30 years,” Parker says. “Industries have our product, and we maintain it to make sure it is meeting the requirements, and at the end of that process, they come to us and say, we need new equipment and we’re coming to you.”

Apart from quality and longevity, what really differentiates Johnston’s boilers from the competition is customization.

As Parker explains, it is important to understand that there is a basic design and it’s ready to go to market, but what Johnston will do is modify the standard design to meet the customer’s requirements. For example, certain parts can be moved to different locations on the equipment so as to accommodate the size and layout of the boiler room.

“A lot of our competition won’t do that. They say what you see is what you get,” Parker says. “That strategy works for them because it keeps the cost down, but customization works for us, and identifies us in the market to customers who have very specific needs.”

That, he maintains, is of paramount importance because valued relationships such as Johnston has developed require a collaborative approach on a long-term basis. Johnston, he says, does not take on a project and deliver it a month later; some projects can take two to three years to develop because the company is all about giving customers what they want.

One aspect of customization that is important for industry is having a boiler with the capability of alternating between fuel burning options – natural gas, propane, oil, or bio-fuels.

This is crucial if the operation of the boiler is tied to a critical process which, if required to shutdown, would cause the company to lose staggering sums of money. The cyber-attack on the Colonial Pipeline this past May is just one of the events that can cause energy-infrastructure interruption or prices to rapidly escalate.

Earlier in the year, a two-week cold snap with temperatures below 20°F in Tennessee saw a resulting surge in demand for home heating fuel and a curtailment of supplies. This created a situation where boilers in resin-producing plants that run 24 hours a day were forced to shut down.

That in turn created a shortage of the resin required to manufacture OSB (oriented strand board) products used for sheathing in the residential construction industry, causing construction in areas of the south-east to come to a halt. And this is just one example of the knock-on effect caused when a boiler has to shut down.

At the same time that the resin producing plants in Tennessee were forced to shut down, Texas was experiencing similar frigid temperatures which resulted in a curtailment of fuel, once again causing boilers to shut down and affecting ethanol and gasoline production.

“The ripple effect was seismic,” says Parker, “and millions and millions of dollars were lost in a matter of days.” Much of this loss was to companies whose boilers were dependent upon one type of fuel.

However, had those boilers been customized by Johnston so that they could switch between fuels, that economic fallout could have been avoided. In addition, having the option to choose between fuels means manufacturers can take advantage of fuel price fluctuations.

Another way Johnston is differentiating itself in the marketplace is by increasing capacity. Parker says that in the past customers had asked the company to design boilers for higher design pressures than anything currently produced.

Although Johnston could design the product, until then the company was not capable of lifting the heavier equipment, some of which might weigh in excess of 70 or even 80 tons, in order to assemble, fire-test and ship.

The current design for fire-tube boilers typically tops out at 350 psi, whereas water tube boilers, which supply industries such as large municipal utilities, can design boilers capable of operating pressures in excess of 2000 psi. While a fire-tube boiler could never be designed for pressures that high, new lifting equipment means that Johnston is capable of manufacturing boilers in the 400-600 psi range.

This demonstrates, he says, that Johnston is capable of entering the market segment that requires a higher range, but for which the extreme range produced by water tube boilers would not be necessary.

Chemical distillation, and power generation for smaller, on-site utilities are two examples of areas that require design pressures in the ranges that Johnston is now able to fabricate.

Parker cautions, however, that as the company grows its product, the most important thing is to maintain quality and dependability. That can never be sacrificed to achieve higher pressures, because once design changes are started, they can affect other areas, such as ability to produce steam or to control emissions.

“All those things have to come into play as a product is changed and that is how we evaluate carefully to make sure all those things are maintained.”

In conclusion, Parker says, “As we develop these products and go into new areas, it will continue to be very important to engage with the customer on design. We can’t just go off on our own and design something we ‘think’ the customer wants.

“We have to be collaborative with our customers, to really listen and communicate with them, so that as we conduct product development, our customers remain an integral part of the process.”

The post After 157 Years, These Fire-tube Boilers Continue to Steam Ahead<p class="company">Johnston Boiler Company</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Under the Genturn brand, Expand Machinery offers multitasking computer numerical control (CNC) Swiss screw and Swiss lathe turning machines. This line is equipped with an assortment of auxiliary attachments such as spindles and shaping tools that enable operators to perform a range of turning procedures. The Genmill brand provides CNC vertical machining centers and 3-axis to 5-axis milling systems that come standard with 12,000 RPM direct drive spindles. These high-speed systems can greatly increase the output rate and improve the workflow of many machine shops.

For customers who are interested in the high quality of Expand Machinery equipment, but do not require full CNC, the Ganesh line offers manual toolroom CNC lathes and milling machines. This brand contains knee mills, bed mills, and lathes that combine the simplicity and ease of manual machining with the quality and service that comes with any Expand Machinery product.

In addition to providing this wide array of machining products, Expand Machinery also services the equipment after the sale. “We don’t just sell this equipment: we service it; we do after-sales service; we have extra parts for the customer, and we also do application training wherever needed. These quality services are all under one roof, so we sell the equipment but we also have the things surrounding that to support the machines too,” says Ravjeet Singh, general manager at Expand Machinery.

The company was founded in 1985 under its original Ganesh name to present the highly competitive manufacturing industry with the most efficient machining tools possible. From its beginnings as a small family company, the business grew very quickly by focusing on supporting the customer’s needs first. Expand Machinery now has a 15,000-square-foot production facility and 40,000 square feet of warehouse space.

In 2015, the company pursued a partnership with an investment group that was, unfortunately, not successful, and this led to the name change in October of 2019 as part of restructuring the business. “That’s how the name Expand Machinery came about. It’s the exact same product line, the same machines, the same everything, but due to legalities and liabilities, the name was changed to Expand Machinery,” says Ravjeet. The revival received a positive result, and the company’s reputation for customer service prevailed in the machining market. The only setback was timing since shutdowns from the COVID-19 pandemic would occur in approximately six months from that time.

The family atmosphere in the workplace environment was one of the key focus areas in the restructuring initiative in 2019. The investment group that is no longer affiliated with the company had tried to transform the team into more of a corporate organization, and this is what Expand Machinery believes went wrong. Since the beginning, the company has highly valued its family atmosphere and its service-focused approach toward customers, vendors, and suppliers. Fortunately, the team has been able to return to its former ways and maintain its close-knit foundation.

Expand Machinery now has a smaller group of employees since the pandemic began, with fifteen people across the production team, sales, management, and the ownership. It expects to build its numbers back up soon as businesses across the country are finally ready to restore their operations. Part of the reason the company has been able to maintain its team during the erratic year of 2020 is that its business shifted more toward the distributor network versus direct sales. Before last year, Expand Machinery did have distributors throughout the country, and that network has now become its primary source of revenue.

“The pandemic, of course, hit everybody in 2020. We were lucky that we had a very good existing customer base, and one industry which was booming even during the pandemic was gun manufacturing. A lot of our machines do sell in the gun manufacturing business, so we definitely had a good run even with the pandemic,” says Ravjeet. “But overall, we were down approximately twenty to thirty percent.”

Luckily, most of the manufacturing industry is picking up again, and Expand Machinery is already seeing an increase in business in the first quarter of 2021. Most of the industries it works within are beginning to return to pre-pandemic levels of operation, which has translated to growth for the company. The aerospace industry, in particular commercial air travel, has lagged but the situation is expected to improve in the coming months.

During this readjustment period, the biggest challenge for Expand Machinery as well as businesses in many other industries is the increasing cost of materials and a severely backed up supply chain in the factories. The components required to make machines are delayed in delivery, which results in delayed manufacturing machines for customers, and the prices are skyrocketing at the same time.

Now that the market is growing again, Expand Machinery is excited about its recently launched key models. The Genturn-52CS Y2 is an 8-axis Swiss mill/turn center with a two-inch bar capacity that produces complex work in just one handling. The entire Genturn line is based on the done-in-one model, and this addition continues the theme.

A wide range of machining procedures can be completed on one machine, and the new product has received an overwhelming response from the company’s customers. Currently, customers are eagerly awaiting their new machine, as the company is running on backorders for that model.

The steadfast values and principles at Expand Machinery are how the business reached early success so quickly and how it recently rebounded with such force. “We always do what’s right for our customers, employees, business partners, vendors, and suppliers. Being honest, that’s pretty indispensable,” explains Ravjeet. Expand Machinery develops personal relationships with its customers, and this has helped it continue to reach the next levels of success.

As the industry steadily moves toward increased automation, Expand Machinery adds more robotics integration to its machines. The future of the manufacturing industry is exciting, and the company anticipates this development with enthusiasm. It has not set specific goals due to the still unpredictable nature of the market and supply chain but is prepared to be flexible and adapt to any challenges that may come its way. The path forward will be led by the needs and demands of its customers, and Expand Machinery prioritizes its customer-centric approach.

As the world returns to normal, so do the industries to which Expand Machinery offers its line of machining products. The company also anticipates more growth in the coming years. This year it has already seen twenty to twenty-five percent growth over last year’s numbers.

In the last thirty-five years, the Ganesh title and brand has developed a reputation for quality, and although the company has gone through some huge changes, it is determined to demonstrate that its values and principles are unwavering. With its roots as a family business, Expand Machinery has maintained a strong footing in the market because of its commitment to high standards for quality equipment and for the service it delivers to customers.

The post A Family Business Revitalizing itself in the Machining Market<p class="company">Expand Machinery, LLC</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Argent International has over forty years of history, having expanded from a single die-cutter to today’s team of 125 full-time employees. The company’s 100,000-square-foot facility can produce more than twenty million parts per month, and its long history has earned it a place with original equipment manufacturers and Tier One automotive clients such as Ford, GMC, BMW, and many others.

In addition to its mass production, the engineering team at Argent International works closely with clients large and small to design and fabricate custom parts. With its infrastructure able to provide just-in-time delivery, the company is in a prime position to supply the occasionally volatile automobile industry. Its track record, machinery, and history as a 3M Preferred Converter give Argent International the flexibility to weather industrial changes. When the automotive industry slowed to a crawl as a result of COVID-related health measures, the company switched to manufacturing face shields.

For its part, Argent Tape & Label provides environmentally-friendly labels and adhesives for a variety of industries. The company is celebrating over twenty-five years in business and a new lease on life after a narrow brush with insolvency in 2010. Argent Tape & Label offers flexographic and digital printing, as well as process and spot printing and thermal transfers. Like Argent International, the company is also well-versed in custom jobs and can accommodate any material, printing, or stock tag options for a client. This has allowed it to branch out to the food & beverage and medical & pharmaceutical sectors, showcasing its versatility.

Today, Argent International and Argent Tape & Label are working more closely than ever before, though the two are just unique enough to prevent a merger. ATL, having been woman-owned since 2010, remains an active member of the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), and closer to home, the Great Lakes Women’s Business Council (WBC). Argent International, newly woman-owned as of last year, hopes to be WBENC certified by the beginning of next year.

Lynn Perenic, Chief Executive Officer of Argent Tape & Label and President of Argent International, sees it as a chance for greater business representation for women, rather than just a growth opportunity. “I think that, frankly, there are not a lot of women in manufacturing, and there are even fewer women-owned businesses that are die-cutters.” She believes that this move will pave the way for more women-owned businesses in the automotive industry. “I think women tend to look at problems in a different way and solve problems in a different way than male leadership.”

The two companies’ recent cooperation and Argent Tape & Label’s continued prosperity, owe a great deal to Perenic. She recently took over leadership of the latter from its founder, her husband Fred Perenic, but her main objective remains Argent Tape & Label, which she formally took over in 2010. Though new to business, Perenic believed she had the right background for such an ambitious foray. “I’m a special [education] teacher, and I decided I could try to save this little label company,” she says. “So I took it on, and we turned it around.”

The early days were, predictably, an uphill battle; Perenic recalls that, on her first day as CEO, she was informed Argent Tape & Label owed $400,000 in receivables. “From the second the company started, it was underwater,” says Deborah Sellis, who Perenic brought on as Chief Operations Officer in 2016 and who has recently become COO and General Counsel to both companies. However, ten years later, just before COVID, Argent Tape & Label was on track to make $10 million in sales. “What we make costs customers fractions of pennies. That’s a lot of labels and a lot of work,” Sellis notes.

This extraordinary turnaround, which Perenic and Sellis are seeking to bring to Argent International, is a testament to Argent Tape & Label’s open-book management style. This approach focuses on clear communication and accountability across all company sectors, and provides employees with a stake in the game where they too share in the financial success that follows.

While the style is admittedly easier to implement at a smaller company like Argent Tape & Label, the company’s leadership is working to remodel Argent International to this system as well. As the company emerges from COVID restrictions, Sellis states that the company has already implemented open-book practices in daily operations. “It’s not unusual to have your floor-level operator in a meeting with myself or anybody else if it’s a problem that directly impacts them,” she says. “That was part of the culture before COVID, it’s part of the culture with COVID, and now, it’s part of the new normal.”

Indeed, this practice has helped the companies adapt to health restrictions and industrial shutdowns. Argent International and Argent Tape & Label at the height of the pandemic were able to shift from mostly automotive production to PPE and other healthcare equipment. As a vital supplier to an equally vital sector, the companies stayed on-mission for as long as possible, until shutdown orders arrived. “That’s all well and good unless you’re a key supplier and you can’t shut down,” Sellis says. “You have to have the skeleton crew and manage them that way.” But with open communication, remote work policies, and a stringent set of internal health practices, both companies managed to keep employees safe.

A hallmark of Open Book Management is the Mini-game, which is strategically implemented to encourage team-building, continual improvement, and desirable output or cost-saving results. Setting goals and having employees compete with themselves and each other are part of what leads to a robust system within the Argent families. The latest idea is to implement a Mini-game that “improves everybody’s production efficiencies over a certain period of time,” Sellis explains.

Moving forward, Argent International and Argent Tape & Label are continuing to press open-book management as a way of better retaining employees and gaining ideas from unexpected sources. “We have had several… press operators come to us with very viable ideas that, I think, in a closed culture, they would not have brought up,” Perenic says. She tells us how one employee, who also was a member of a band, was shopping for a new drum and noticed a new type of foam in a prospective purchase.

Noticing a sales opportunity, as drum packaging requires both foam and double-sided tape, he brought it to the attention of one of Argent’s sales professionals, who reached out to the drum manufacturer to begin a mutually beneficial partnership. Perenic believes that a typical manufacturing setting, lacking the collaboration between floor employees and sales staff, would not have seen this happen.

Due to such programs, employee retention is not an issue—a relative rarity in manufacturing jobs these days. Thanks to competitive wages, Argent International boasts turnover so low that the company gives prizes for ten, twenty, and thirty years of service. This is normally a trip to Hawaii, but with COVID, “we’re still working on that portion,” Perenic says with a chuckle. Work-life balance is also a large driver of company retention. She relates the story of one employee who left Argent International but returned after the birth of his second child to take advantage of the company’s working atmosphere.

As Argent International and Argent Tape & Label move forward, the companies have endured the crucible of the pandemic. “We had to really reinvent ourselves in a number of ways,” she admits. “We backslid but we’re right back in the game.” Comprehensive business plans will help the two avoid future troubles. Perenic jokes that she is “creatively paranoid,” and applies this to business plans. “I always like to pretend that thirty percent of our business is going to go away, and it did with the pandemic,” she says. Future safeguards, she believes, should help keep both companies running.

As Argent International and Argent Tape & Label move forward, the two companies demonstrate the alliance needed to move forward in automotive. The hybrid and electric vehicle market is still a growing sector for the companies, particularly Argent International’s solutions to deal with vehicle noise, vibration, and harshness. “When you have the quiet motor of an electric vehicle, all sorts of new sounds become audible since the over-riding noise of the combustion engine has been eliminated,” Perenic points out.

The two companies intend to attend Michigan’ Adhesives and Bonding Expo, planned as an in-person event as vaccinations have increased. After more than a year of virtual exhibitions, Argent’s leadership says it is the right time to return to live events. “People want to get back. They need to, we need to, and we want to,” Sellis remarks. “I think once it amps up—once a few people break the ice—then it’ll move pretty quickly.” As Argent leads the charge at such expositions, new business development is sure to follow.

The post The Best of Both Worlds<p class="company">Argent International and Argent Tape & Label</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

The famous sixth-century BC philosopher, Lao Tzu, notably reminded the world that while water is eternally yielding, it can wear away hard materials like stone. WARDJet— the waterjet brand of AAG Tailored Cutting Solutions—harnesses this tremendously powerful characteristic in its waterjet CNC machines, renowned worldwide for strength, quality, and flexibility.

WARDJet waterjets’ dependability and precision make these machines even more highly sought-after. Supported by teams of technical experts across Canada, the USA, the UK, and Poland, the company specializes in custom research and development focusing on its clients’ unique needs. The company’s two North American facilities boast around 80,000 square feet each, with CNC routers manufactured in the Burlington, Ontario facility and waterjets at the Tallmadge, Ohio site.

“For thirty years, we have been designing routers, knives, and modular CNC machinery that can be purpose-built to our client’s needs. Our global team of technical experts provide direct support to ensure our customers optimize their production,” says Chief Executive Officer Luke Hansen-MacDonald.

One of its best features is that WARDJet machines easily integrate with existing robotics, conveyor systems, or vision systems. This aspect is especially attractive for medium-sized companies that benefit from the significant cost savings this offers. This is because the modular design allows for near-endless configuration, making it possible to upgrade operations in stages to optimize production.

WARDJet is uniquely positioned with a large research and development department to offer capabilities like no other product of its kind. There is nothing generic about a WARDJet waterjet and all are designed and produced in Ohio, U.SA. While its full range can cut anything from steel to six-inch titanium, glass, and stone, the brand is also proud to offer the widest range of waterjets to effortlessly glide through softer materials like foam, rubber, and textiles.

The company’s research and development team works closely with customers so that the final product does what it should do and performs to the client’s desired output, something that is impossible with generic machines. For example, WARDJet has a product line tailored to foam and rubber processing. This product line has bespoke features that optimize production and reduce waste.

What makes waterjet cutting preferable to other cutting methods is its versatility and low heat generation. This makes it especially attractive to manufacturing in the aerospace, automotive, prototyping and advanced materials industries which all need to cut a variety of specialized, sensitive materials with different densities.

In contrast to laser and plasma cutting methods, waterjet cutting does not generate high temperatures. Heat can often be undesirable as it adversely affects the integrity of the materials to which it is applied, often on a molecular level.

Hansen-MacDonald also explains that, for cutting harder materials such as metal and stone, an abrasive is added to the cutting stream, strengthening and accelerating the erosion process.

Because AAG does its own sales and service, customers have direct access to knowledgeable, industry-focused technical specialists to assist with all types of support. For example, the team has been working with foam converting customers for decades and have built extensive knowledge of their specific needs.

WARDJet recently launched the Apex 60, a 5-Axis waterjet cutting head. This innovation creates beautifully cut three-dimensional shapes and bevel cutting. Even better than its technology is the price; the unit is much more affordable than most would imagine for such incredible quality. It can also be configured with any of the WARDJet range of products. The Apex 60 5-Axis head “was designed by our amazing engineering team in Ohio. Special thanks to our engineers Kyle, Jimmy, and Rob,” says Hansen-MacDonald.

It is not just technology that this company takes seriously. Service and building solid relationships are also important features of its culture. When you buy from WARDJet, “you aren’t just buying a machine; you are buying a partnership with our team. Our purpose-built products provide output levels that cannot be achieved by cookie-cutter machines,” Hansen-MacDonald adds.

WARDJet products and support teams contributed to safer communities in a big way during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Online forums, free webinars, and sales incentives were launched to help customers adapt to manufacturing personal protection equipment (PPE) and other essential goods. “My team is why we survived. We support a lot of essential industries from medical equipment, energy to defence. They were unbelievably brave and tenacious. We spent a lot of time focusing on helping customers retool to produce PPE and medical supplies,” Hansen-MacDonald says.

With such dedication at the epicentre of the firm’s success, it comes as no surprise that it is the AAG team of 250 employees around the world that makes the company so successful. Celebrating 30 years of CNC innovation and expertise, their depth of knowledge is a big driver behind customer satisfaction across industries. As a result, the company avoided large-scale layoffs. While the decision was hard, management now recognizes this as the correct course of action in the long term as it protected what it calls its ‘bench strength.’

Transparency is the key to retaining high motivation within WARDJet and all the other AAG brands. To achieve this, Hansen-MacDonald hosts a large, monthly online meeting of thirty minutes to keep staff informed of company events and news occurring in all their locations world-wide.

Staff also benefit from educational support as well as rotating through different positions throughout the firm so that everyone understands all aspects of the business and its products. Monthly donations to local charities are made consistently by staff, who are then eligible to win raffle prizes like a paid day off, gift cards, and other surprises.

The result of all this carefully applied cultivation is a close-knit group of genuinely caring people who like to extend their generosity beyond the company. At the end of the year, donations are matched by the company and donated to a charity in the region.

Looking at the rest of 2021 and beyond, AAG’s WARDJet team is positive that COVID-19 will be followed by strong economic growth globally. As local manufacturing grows, an increasing number of small-to-medium-sized firms are looking to WARDJet for quality modular automation at decent prices and great support service, but there is much more great news on its way.

“We are very excited to head into Industry 4.0 with our new internet of things (IoT) platform. This will allow customers to access valuable sensor data via the cloud to optimize their productivity. More information will come on this release later this year,” says Hansen-MacDonald. As customers invest in not only WARDJet machines but rather WARDJet partnerships, the future is looking rosy.

The post Cutting-Edge Technology: Harnessing the Power of Water<p class="company">WARDJet</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

The Bremen, Germany-based company develops and produces release agents, special coatings, and cleaning agents for the plastics industry, wood processing, foundry, and glass industries. It also supplies coolants, anti-corrosion agents, cutting oils, and other processing aids to the metal industry. ACMOS enjoys a global presence through its worldwide network of subsidiaries and sales partners and boasts an export quota of over seventy percent.

Founded in 1909, ACMOS got its start primarily as a trading company. Within a few decades, the company began developing its own chemicals, laying the groundwork for the international powerhouse we see today. It truly took off in the 1950s with the development of release agents for the polyurethane seats used in automobiles.

“We entered into a development program with Ford in Europe back in the 1950s, when polyurethane seats were first developed,” says Mark Hesseling, President of ACMOS Inc, the company’s subsidiary in North America. The company immediately expanded on that success. “Ever since then, we really broadened our portfolio in release agents and cleaners to now quickly growing from not only polyurethane but also going into wood manufacturing, composites, rubber, thermoplastics, glass, and other applications.”

Its personalized approach sets the company apart. “We tend to custom-formulate a lot of our products specifically to our customers’ process,” Hesseling says. “We really want to optimize the cycle time of our customers’ process. We want to reduce their scrap rate as far as we can and, of course, make sure that the parts that they produce have the best surface quality as well. So that really makes us different from our competition, who tend to offer more off the shelf or standardized products.”

And that is not the only way ACMOS sets itself apart. “A second way that we differentiate ourselves is through our hands-on technical support,” he says. “We have a team of technical salespeople who provide a wealth of hands-on support during initial trials but also troubleshooting if there are issues in the production environment or if the customer is looking for ways to further optimize the use of our product.” Over thirty percent of the company’s employees globally work in either product development or technical customer support, ensuring customers receive the personalized attention they deserve.

ACMOS also stands out as a fifth-generation, family-owned business. The family is still active in the day-to-day management of the company 112 years after its founding. “Family-owned companies tend to not survive after the third generation in many cases,” Hesseling points out. “But we’ve been quite successful.” In fact, the company has managed to stay completely financially independent.

The family’s continued involvement has helped shape the company culture, creating a positive environment for both the employers and the employees. “There is a closeness to this business,” he says. “As a family business, we care about our employees, maybe a little bit differently than most publicly-traded companies do… We are a family business in every sense.”

This close-knit culture is demonstrated by how long employees tend to stick around. “The average tenure with the company is in the twenty years [range],” Hesseling says. “We have people that have been with the company for forty years, so there’s a certain loyalty, both by the ownership and the management toward the employees, as well as the employees toward the management and the ownership. So it’s a very reciprocal loyalty that we find in the business. It is a very trusting environment. People have a lot of freedom to do their job, and I think it’s a very good environment to work in.”

ACMOS is in the midst of an exciting expansion in the United States, which will enable the company to serve its North American customers better. The company has already been producing some products in the United States through contract manufacturing, but will soon take on more of the manufacturing process. “Since the challenges brought on by COVID and all the shutdowns around the world and all the logistical issues, we’ve really accelerated our plans to produce more of the products we sell in North America stateside,” he reports.

COVID’s effect on the business has been far-reaching, but it has managed to overcome the difficulties. “It is quite a challenge,” he says. “Many automotive manufacturers had to shut down their operations during the second quarter, so our sales to automotive companies were affected quite a bit. Fortunately, we’re diversified enough to absorb some of those reductions in sales.”

Although the company’s primary emphasis has traditionally been on the automotive industry, ACMOS was able to make up the loss by selling to other markets, particularly the construction industry and the sports and recreation industry, “which are markets that have gone up quite a bit,” Hesseling says. “So that’s helped us a lot from a sales and profitability point of view.”

“From a materials point of view, it’s been quite a challenge because of all the logistical issues that we’ve seen around the world moving raw materials [and] finished products from one region to the next. And one of the ways that we’ve been able to buffer some of those challenges is by bringing on more inventory in our warehouses of our finished products. We did that to make sure that once our customers started back up they would not have any issues being supplied with our products.”

The company looks forward to continued expansion in the future. “We’re definitely growing,” he says. “We have been growing for the last few years, and I see us really accelerating that growth now in the near to midterm with the help of more local manufacturing. It’s going to really set up for some accelerated growth as a business.” The next step is to hire more people and to focus on increasing sales.

ACMOS also plans to continue diversifying. “Going back to the challenges that we saw from COVID, I think it’s also important to further diversify our business, beyond being too reliant on automotive,” says Hesseling. “It’s important for us to stay financially healthy and take care of our employees by making sure that we’ve got a very well-balanced group of customers and technologies that we can rely on.”

After more than a century in business and with the founding family still at the helm, ACMOS boasts an impressive track record. The company is well prepared to endure current challenges, expand and diversify, and continue to thrive.

The post A Century of Industry Leadership—and Still Growing<p class="company">ACMOS</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

For the first time, Foam Expo North America and the Adhesives & Bonding Expo are being held simultaneously in the same facility, so attendees can take in both shows. In 2020, the expositions would have been presented similarly but were hosted online instead, due to COVID concerns. Strict health measures have been put into place to keep everyone safe at the 2021 conference, and it is free to attend.

“This is usually an annual event, so there will be plenty of people who missed out last year who would like to get together. I think it will be a great opportunity for people to meet and network and find out about the latest innovations that are taking place. Whether it’s COVID-related or not, we’ve seen a lot of interesting trends come forward over the last couple of years,” states Conference Producer Callum Gibson of the company Smarter Shows.

Industrial foam solutions are used in an array of applications and products in the packaging, medical, construction, automotive, aerospace, and sports/leisure sectors, while bonding materials and adhesives play a crucial role in manufacturing operations.

The combined expo will feature a series of presentations, exhibitions, networking events, speakers, and panel discussions, covering materials, machinery, and production methods. Market trends, scientific innovations, and industry regulations will also be in the spotlight, as will personnel issues with such events as a panel discussion about workforce. Over five hundred firms such as 3M, Sekisui, Bostik, and JSP will be displaying their wares.

There is no overarching theme; rather each day will feature a different focus. The focus of the first day is sustainability, which is “one of the key areas we’re going to be looking at this year,” says Gibson.

It is a timely topic, given that the U.S. government recently re-joined the Paris Climate Agreement which includes clauses about emission reduction and energy efficiency. The Biden administration has committed to a fifty percent reduction in greenhouse gas pollution by 2030.

Gibson says that the foam and adhesives sectors are “uniquely situated,” to help the U.S. government meet its pollution pledge. Foam and adhesives play a central role in light-weighting—the practice of building airplanes and automobiles out of tough but low-weight materials to reduce fuel costs and emissions. Low-weight parts and components need to be adhered to each other while industrial foam products can replace heavier metal materials.

In keeping with the focus on sustainability, day one will feature “a particularly exciting,” opening meeting devoted to eco-friendly issues. Speakers will “come together for a plenary opening address. They will be having an interactive panel discussion around the topic of fostering environmentally-conscious material development to meet consumer demand and regulatory requirements,” he states.

Panelists for this opening day discussion include Lee Polance, vice president of global technology, engineering adhesives at H.B. Fuller; Anne Brown, head of North American product development and technical customer service, Loctite; Steve Sopher, technical director at JSP; and Marty Muenzmaier, sustainability and external affairs leader, Cargill Bioindustrial Group.

Day two, which focuses on applications and manufacturing, also features “some very interesting panels,” says Gibson. As an example, he points to a discussion dedicated to the topic of offsetting competing objectives for thermal management, acoustic, and shock absorption applications. Thermal management, in terms of insulating batteries, has become an increasingly important issue given the growing popularity of electric and hybrid vehicles, he notes. Fouad Mohammad, principal engineer of computational fluid dynamics and solid structural mechanics analysis at Bergstrom Inc. and Tim Vokes, senior applications engineer at Parker Lord, will be leading the discussion.

On day three, the focus shifts to regulation and testing, with a morning panel on staying ahead of regulatory updates. The discourse will be offered by Nao Nakamura, technical manager at Toyo Ink America, LLC; Ernest B. Wysong, vice president of technology at Natural Polymers, LLC; Margaret Sheppard of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and Stephen Wieroniey, director at the Center for the Polyurethanes Industry, American Chemistry Council.

There will also be a return of some of the fun activities from previous expos, including a ‘B2B matchmaking’ event designed to facilitate meetings between potential suppliers and buyers.

The B2B matching service will provide “an opportunity for anyone within the supply chain—whether you are a raw material supplier or a technology supplier—who wants to meet up with other businesses who could be a potential supplier or customer for you. If you have a particular business in that space that you are hoping to connect with, setting up that meeting and be able to meet at the show in person is a great way of doing so,” explains Gibson.

“The expo is specifically aimed at engineers,” according to Gibson, and engineers who attend should come away with a better sense of “what materials are available and how they might be able to improve their existing products.” They can also glean insights about new or newly enhanced processes that are intended to boost efficiency and throughput while lowering costs.

Anyone working in product development or technical services might want to check out the expo to investigate new applications, market trends, and “what the competition are up to,” he adds.

Foam Expo was originally launched as a standalone event. It featured a great deal of crossover content relevant to the bonding and adhesives industry, however. “Part of what made Foam Expo so interesting was the presence of the adhesive manufacturing side of things. This was identified as a key area that would be interesting to expand on,” notes Gibson.

As a result, a separate Adhesives & Bonding Expo was launched to accommodate interest in that field. In 2020, organizers intended to host both expos together, but COVID scuttled the plan. An online-only conference was held instead.

“We had a virtual event and a virtual exhibition that ran very successfully. Alongside that, we had a number of conference sessions which also took place virtually where audience members were able to log on and speak and interact with speakers from a safe distance,” he says.

While the virtual expo was well-received, organizers are clearly pleased with being able to hold a more traditional event this year. The delayed launch of the first-ever in-person co-located conference has ramped up expectations for the 2021 show.

“We’re very excited to be putting the conference. The newest feature this year will be the [combination] of both foam and adhesive topics. There might be topics that blend, and then there are topics that will remain separate because they are quite specific to [a particular part] of the supply chain,” notes Gibson.

Plenty of people within the foam and bonding/adhesives community seem to share the organizers’ excitement as registration numbers for 2021 are strong. “We’ve very positive it’s going to be a good turnout,” he says. Foam Expo 2019—the last in-person event of its kind—drew over 5,200 people from forty-five countries.

Organizers are keenly aware of the need to maintain health protocols due to COVID’s lingering presence. Some product demonstrations from exhibitors will be moved online this year, although “There will still be bits of technology on the show floor that are going to be there and can be accessed by the attendees,” assures Gibson.

“The conference area has been adjusted to fit the requirements of socially distanced spacing. We’ve reduced the number of seats and spaced them apart in a larger area—meaning that while everyone can sit and watch the conference, there will be a slightly reduced amount of people within the conference area. And there will be regularly scheduled cleaning,” he states, noting that cleaning crews “will be going through between each session to make sure that everything is wiped down properly.”

Additional health precautions include wider aisles and hand sanitizing stations located around the venue. Attendees are asked to maintain physical distancing and avoid handshakes. Food will be individually packaged, and extra staff will be on hand to provide guidance and health-related assistance.

While the event will not be live-streamed, organizers intend to put content online at some point.

If all goes to plan, and there is no resurgence of a new COVID variant, the co-located Foam Expo/Adhesives & Bonding Expo in Michigan will mark the resurgence of in-person industry events covering these sectors. Smarter Shows plans to host a new Adhesives Bonding Expo Europe show later this year, to complement the already existing Foam Expo Europe. The firm will also be launching Foam Expo China in Shanghai this December.

“As we get back to normal, we go back to our usual stride,” says Gibson.

The post Bringing Innovative Solutions Back to an in-Person Event Format<p class="company">Foam Expo North America and the Adhesives & Bonding Expo</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX, launched the hyperloop idea as open-source technology back in 3013, noting in his alpha paper that a design featuring air bearings would generate an air pocket on which a pod would ride. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT, Culver City, California, U.S.), meanwhile, is the proud owner of the first full-scale Hyperloop passenger pod, complete with its 320-metre test track in Toulouse, France.

As Musk’s original air-bearing concept was deemed dangerous and impractical, Virgin Hyperloop’s design employs an advanced version of maglev, short for magnetic levitation, similar to the method already in use in the world’s fastest trains. In Virgin’s hyperloop technology, magnetic bearings lift and pull pods, or aeroshells, through nearly airless tubes at breathtaking speeds with the help of pressure controls that vary the already-minimized airflow inside tunnels, delivering a safe, smooth ride with minimum disturbance to passengers.

Other companies are also researching hyperloop technology with the aim of commercial travel. According to hyperloopconnected.org/, set up by students of the Delft University of Technology as a meeting point where researchers and engineers can join forces and share ideas, many teams around the globe are searching for ways to bring viable hyperloop technology to market. To achieve speeds of one thousand kilometres per hour, inventing new materials and methods to manufacture these vehicles is of the essence.

Delft Hyperloop, the Dutch student group from Delft University of Technology that is developing a climate-neutral hyperloop system, recently chose to employ artificial intelligence in their design. The group submitted its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to artificial intelligence (AI) by the Franche-Comté Electronics Mechanics Thermal Science and Optics – Sciences and Technologies (FEMTO-ST), achieving in mere minutes improved. As one of four founding members of the European Hyperloop Week (EHW) held in Valencia, Spain this month from the 19th to the 25th, the team has entered its design in the event’s contest.

Hyperloop pods are subjected to conditions akin to flying about 200,000 feet above the earth which is roughly six times higher than commercial airplanes. Composite materials containing carbon fibre are being examined since lightweight, high-resistance materials will be needed to create these pods. In some cases, carbon fibre is already replacing specialized plastics, often in the form of specialty ‘pre-pregs,’ like the TenCate 8020, a carbon-fibre-reinforced fabric impregnated with epoxy and favoured for its lightness and strength as well as its impressive stiffness to weight ratio and its shape versatility. The term pre-preg comes from ‘pre-impregnated,’ as these composite materials are made from fibres pre-impregnated with partially cured epoxy, resin, or thermoplastics.

John Jackson, technical support engineer for Toray Advanced Composites in England noted to Composites World magazine in 2019, that the growing market created by aviation and aerospace giants for more structural thermoplastics, out-of-autoclave (OOA) plastics that have been vacuum, heat, and pressure-treated for improved performance, and automated thermoplastics that guarantee consistent quality by restricting manual interaction during composite manufacturing is likely to continue being echoed by hyperloop engineers.

One of the most spellbinding materials to be used so far, however, is the mythical-sounding Vibranium, a composite fabricated from sensor-containing carbon fibre. The material was developed by HyperloopTT for its first Quintero One passenger pod and is said to have been inspired by Captain America’s shield from of Marvel Comics. The vessel is comprised of eighty-two panels manufactured from this new material and was brought to life in Madrid, Spain as a collaboration between the owner and Airtificial, a company that was formed by a transport and infrastructure composites fabricator and a civil engineering firm nearly three years ago. The company has extended the use of the smart carbon fibre to its tubes where the materials are combined with steel and concrete to create the casings to propel its passenger pods.

Other composite metal materials are also being manufactured for the hyperloop market, like aluminum matrix composites that offer improved flexibility and resistance to environmental extremes compared to alloys used in everyday construction. Concrete can also be reinforced for better performance, as in the case of ultra-high-performance steel-fibre-reinforced concrete for significantly stronger yet less bulky hyperloop tubes.

Delft Hyperloop is even considering employing continuous filament winding as a means to manufacture composite tubes on site. The technology is being developed in a research partnership with a specialist in the field, Jules Dock from the Netherlands, who uses the method to fabricate offshore wind turbine towers, for a different take on the epoxy-based carbon fibre that won the student team its first SpaceX Pod Innovation Award in 2016.

The sheer length of the tunnels needed to reach the phenomenal speeds of around one thousand kilometres per hour, the cost expected, the durability required, and the safety of hyperloop’s vacuum tubes are all important factors to consider when developing materials for manufacture. Considering the science to achieve the level of safety needed for these vacuum tubes to carry passengers is vital.

Turbo-molecular pumps running between 20,000 and 90,000 rotations per minute keep a low-vacuum state inside the tunnel where the high-pressure conditions caused by the surrounding atmosphere outside means that the slightest weakness in the construction of a tube can result in a fatal implosion, putting at risk the lives of everyone inside the pods.

Therefore, while all the innovative and entrepreneurial adventurers hooked on hyperloop systems come up with improved designs, the manufacturers of the world must continue developing ever-stronger and lighter materials that are also gentle on the environment in their development, fabrication, and in end-of-life-cycle to ensure the future of next-generation, high-speed travel grows responsibly.

The post In the Loop<p class="company">Manufacturing for Pod and Hyperloop Technology</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

We spoke with company owner and President Benjamin Merkley, who represents the third generation of company ownership; Senior Vice President Marc Galarneau, who’s been with the company for over 40 years; and Vice President of Sales, Shannon Hall, to learn more about Dustbane and how it is ticking all the boxes.

The company’s roots can be traced back to several years before it was founded by Chester Pickering in Ottawa in 1908 – to a time when he was a homeless teenager who did cleaning chores for housewives in exchange for food. But it wasn’t just a matter of earning a meal for himself, says Hall; he’d offer to do extra so that he’d get more food to share with friends who were also homeless.

To this day, Dustbane’s guiding principles have remained focused on ensuring a clean environment for the public, whether it be in a school or hospital, on a construction site or airplane, or in a shopping mall. And, through its corporate culture, Dustbane remains committed to helping others, just as Chester Pickering did.

“We grew from manufacturing a single product,” says Merkley, “to where we are today, supplying a full line of cleaning chemicals and equipment for commercial and industrial use. What makes us different is how we go to market. We really try to engage with the end users to understand their businesses and challenges and we come up with customized solutions that we can provide through our local distribution partners.”

Dustbane still manufactures the original sweeping compound that gave its name to the company, but in truth, Dustbane is about so much more.

In a 155,000 square foot facility in Ottawa, the company manufactures over 100 commercial and industrial cleaning chemicals including a complete range of ECOLOGO® Certified products. All have undergone testing to ensure they are compliant with national environmental standards and meet industry-specific needs.

In addition, the company manufactures floor polishers, vacuums, and other cleaning equipment and accessories. The company keeps significant inventory and is ready to ship from the warehouse to distributors across Canada on the same day an order is received.

Game changers
While phrases such as ‘game changer’ are sometimes merely advertising hype, Dustbane’s HealthGuard One-Step Disinfectant, Cleaner and Deodorant concentrate, when used with the Victory Electrostatic Sprayer, is a veritable game changer.

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country, the Victory Electrostatic Sprayer put Dustbane light-years ahead of the competition, focusing on the critical need for thorough disinfection of shared hard surfaces in public places. “The notion of, ‘If it looks clean, it must be clean,’ was no longer good enough,” says Galarneau, who after over 40 years at Dustbane knows a thing or two about cleaning.

This disinfectant concentrate manufactured by Dustbane is an effective mildewcidal and fungicidal sanitizing spray that will completely disinfect visibly clean, hard, non-porous surfaces within five minutes of contact time, the company says. But application through a hand-held spray bottle is time-consuming, especially if there’s a requirement to penetrate every crack and cranny of surfaces people may have touched, or where mildew or fungus is growing. And also, in high traffic areas, having to do it more than once a day.

This is where a partnership with the U.S.-based Victory Innovations Company, which manufactures the Victory Electrostatic Sprayer, enters the equation.

As the company explains it, the sprayer’s “patent-pending technology provides an electrical charge to the disinfectant, allowing it to wrap conductive surfaces with an effective and even coverage. Double-charged particles also envelope all surfaces, whether they’re shadowed, vertical or underneath.”

The sprayer was designed to save time and labour, to spray less liquid and cover more surface area, and since 2019 has been distributed in Canada by Dustbane.

We watched a demonstration video and saw how a traditional spray bottle took 1 minute and 13 seconds to cover a 50 square foot area, gulping over 10 fluid ounces of disinfectant. But it was truly eclipsed by the capabilities of the Victory Electrostatic Sprayer which covered the same area (at its maximum application-thickness setting of 110 microns) in just 22 seconds, sipping just over three fluid ounces.

The result was a 69 percent reduction in the amount of chemicals used, and completion more than three times faster by the Victoria Electrostatic Sprayer.

Merkley shares how “we’d started looking for innovation and bringing a solution to the marketplace to make the job easier, to hit the performance curve and get a return on investment, and this was it. The device sprays electrically charged particles into the air and these are attracted to hard surfaces. They spread and land evenly, and if using a disinfectant, kill viruses and bacteria.”

The demands of staying safe
This was prior to COVID-19 when the sprayer was being shown as a way to reduce labour and product costs, but when the pandemic hit, Merkley says, there was a huge demand for cleaning solutions. The demand was so great that the Dustbane team immediately pivoted to doing thousands of virtual demos with distributors as well as end users – factories, schools, hospitals, municipalities – how to use the product, giving them a safe solution to issues posed by the pandemic, and in the process, revolutionized cleaning.

“I want to tell you,” says Merkley, “how proud I am of the way our staff responded during the pandemic, when it got crazy in March, 2020. The demand for cleaning solutions was overwhelming and our staff responded beyond what I could have hoped for.” Dustbane operates on a five-day, 40-hour production schedule, “but we were beyond double shifting seven days a week to keep up with demand. Staff from accounting and financing, and Marc and Shannon and I, we were all pitching in on the filling line to get the product out to our customers.”

Galarneau believes the demand for this product will continue. “We believe that long after the pandemic is past, cleaning is going to remain a priority in everyone’s life. People are going to expect to work in a clean office and enjoy clean environments wherever they go.”

Site surveys show the way
When Merkley and his team went into the field to demonstrate the electrostatic sprayer, it was by no means the first time they had connected in such a personal way with end users. In fact, the company’s entire sales program is centred around providing cost-effective solutions to cleaning challenges, as opposed to simply selling product.

It begins with a site survey, which involves taking an audit of a business or institution’s cleaning practices and is offered without charge. From there a Dustbane representative can show the end user just how much is being spent, can identify labour savings, and point out blind spots that may affect health and safety.

Hall says that end users face challenges around how they do their cleaning, and to assist with that the Dustbane team can create individualized programs, with flow charts and matching materials and training sessions that demonstrate how to apply the chemicals in the safest way. This way tasks are not missed, and nothing is done that could badly impact surfaces.

“There are different risks and hazards in every area,” she says. “Healthcare has its own challenges, but so does manufacturing, where there could be opportunities for bacteria to build up in sitting water or grease spills. We need to look at what risk or hazard is associated with each specific business. We don’t take a cookie-cutter approach as no two situations are ever the same.”

Giving meaning to cleaning
This article began with the tale of how Dustbane founder Chester Pickering shared food he earned by doing household chores among other homeless youth. 113 years later, the company remains true to his humanitarian outlook, through a formalized program Give Meaning to Your Cleaning™, aimed at giving back to local communities and doing what is right for the planet.

A year ago, Dustbane began planting a tree for every jug of its hard-surface cleaner sold. To date over 185,000 trees have been planted in Madagascar, an island country off the east coast of Africa that has been ravaged by the effects of deforestation, land degradation, and the effects of climate change. 80 percent of the population is subsistence farmers who survive on $2 per day.

By planting trees, the people are paid a living wage and food security is enhanced. It is also hoped that this may help reverse some of the effects of land degradation which has almost destroyed the island nation and that the trees will have a positive effect on climate change.

With regards to Dustbane’s manufacturing policy vis à vis the environment, raw materials and packaging materials are carefully selected, with products undergoing a stringent third-party certification process.

The company is also working to remove single-use plastics while researching creative ways to repurpose other materials. For example, the sweeping compound is shipped in reusable garbage containers manufactured from recycled plastics collected in blue bins in Ontario.

Acts of Kindness is another branch of Dustbane’s Give Meaning To Your Cleaning™ program. It partners with not-for-profits in various locations across Canada where the company does business. In Ottawa it has partnered with Equal Chance, a charity whose focus is on helping economically disadvantaged black youth and providing them with some of the educational equipment children from middle class families take for granted.

Elsewhere in Canada the company partners with distributors to help a local charity or cause. In East Vancouver, for example, they loaded a truck with 400 pizzas and drinks, and served them to 400 people in need. They also donate cleaning chemicals to homeless shelters and other not-for-profits which may find maintaining a clean environment a challenge.

“There are lots of different ways to support organizations across the country and around the world. It’s been a phenomenal journey,” says Hall.

Chester Pickering would be proud.

The post Bringing New Meaning to Cleaning<p class="company">Dustbane</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

The first AUV was developed as early as 1957 at the University of Washington by Stan Murphy, Bob Francois, and Terry Ewart. The vehicle, called Special Purpose Underwater Research Vehicle (SPURV), was used for basic research into underwater diffusion, acoustic transmission, and the wakes of submarines.

Another prototype was developed at the university, Unmanned Arctic Submersible (UARS), meant for military exploration under ice. AUVs continued to be developed in both America and the Soviet Union over the years and the development and advancement of them is now an industry unto itself.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration and Research fully defines an AUV as an underwater vehicle that carries its power onboard. This power enables its propellers or thrusters to move it through the water and is necessary for it operate its sensors. Most AUVs use specialized batteries, although different models have used fuel cells or even rechargeable solar power; other types of AUVs, like gliders, minimize energy demands by allowing gravity and buoyancy to propel it.

AUVs are seen as particularly attractive options for ocean-based research because they can reach shallow water areas than most boats cannot, and deeper water than either human divers or tethered vehicles can achieve. Once deployed and underwater, the vehicles are safe from inclement weather and can stay underwater for extended periods of time. They are also modular, meaning that the user can choose which sensor to attach depending on the objectives of research or its intended use; for example, estimates of a vehicle’s acceleration and velocity while underwater can be calculated with an additional Inertial Measurement Unit or even improved with a Doppler Velocity Log. AUVs are seen as a less expensive option that a typical research vessel but with the added advantage of being able to complete identical repeat surveys of an area.

The Schmidt Ocean Institute further notes the advantage of AUVs over ROVs in that the former are small and easily portable, boast a greater capability for speed, mobility, and spatial range and, in not being tethered to a ship, are able to improve data collection rates.

Organizations like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution keep track of the various types of AUV and the uses that each one has. For example, the REMUS vehicle is designed for coastal monitoring as well as survey operations at various ocean depths, the Mesobot studies life in the ocean’s mid-water or twilight zone, and vehicles like the Slocum glider and the SENTRY can dive down thousands of feet in the ocean for exploration and research purposes.

Organizations like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) began developing unmanned and un-tethered underwater vehicles to remove the high cost of personnel incurred when taking scientific samples of the ocean. AUVs have a lower cost when compared to other types of ships, which is especially helpful as the vehicles generally see a demand for diverse payloads. MBARI created a modular vehicle that can be quickly reconfigured to host many different loads without modifying its base components.

An AUV is typically programmed on the surface to navigate the water on its own, at which point it can measure the physical characteristics of the water to detect chlorophyll levels, measure the concentrations of small particles in the water, and collect images of the sea floor.

A multitude of industries utilize AUV technology today for various applications beyond scientific research. In the workspace, oil and gas industries are a prime investor in the technology as it can be used to make detailed seafloor maps, an important step in the installation of undersea pipelines. Survey companies can also use it for the inspection of pipelines and of other underwater structures. The vehicles can also be used by a multitude of sectors in the study of lakes, oceans, and the ocean floor itself. It is a prime tool for specific and difficult tasks in oceanographic research, such as for the determination of the concentration of various elements or compounds and the presence of microscopic life in bodies of water. Military and disaster relief usages are also possible, as the US military often calls on the technology for unmanned surveillance and reconnaissance missions, as well as for warfare, countermeasures, and more. Finally, certain investors have been known to utilise the technology for hobbyist purposes.

In a market research report, IBISWorld reports that the biggest supporters of AUV usage are the oil and gas markets and the US military. The AUV manufacturing industry is a relatively young one but did not record its first sale until 1985. The report continues: “Over the five years to 2020, IBISWorld estimates that industry revenue has increased at an annualized rate of 26.5 percent to $885.4 million. This includes projected growth of 24.4 percent in 2020. Fortunately, because much of industry revenue is already earmarked each fiscal year by the US government, the industry is likely to escape a windfall in revenue…” Modern AUV suppliers include companies such as Teledyne Marine, RJE Oceanbotics, RTSYS, Blue Robotics, and more. Many companies that invest in and offer AUV services are private companies with a global reach, although a majority are US-based.

In a paper on the pros and cons of using AUVs as research vessels, Paul G. Fernandes, Pete Stevenson, and Andrew S. Brierly note the optimal size of an AUV (“torpedo-shaped… 2-10 m in length and 0.2-1.3 m in diameter”) in researching undersea and icy conditions as well as the lack of noise generated and the low cost of operation. However, the vehicles generally sport limited range due in part to the power it is required to operate on. “Given that an AUV has been designed to have low drag and efficient propulsion, the range is entirely dependent on the quantity (size) and quality of the power source which currently dominates the vehicle volume.”

Lithium ion and silver zinc cells are purported by the three to be the most cost-effective and useful options for power but require a significant investment on the part of the buyer and the manufacturer. Weight distribution is an important consideration in the design of an AUV and battery options like that of a manganese alkaline battery can affect the cost-effectiveness of an operating AUV, despite being a cheaper option. In addition, the Schmidt Ocean Institute notes that, in not being tethered like an ROV, an AUV may not be able to draw as much power nor communicate real-time data. AUVs are also able to be influenced by strong currents and are not suitable for areas that are heavily populated by undersea life due to acoustic interference and the risk of collision or entanglement.

An infographic by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Spectrum explains that future builds of AUVs will likely be stationed on the sea floor housed in a battery compartment that will charge it and allow it to process and send information topside, an alternative to the ongoing power issue most vehicles face. High-speed communications from the vehicle to base could be maintained through a fibre optic cable manufactured to break easily at resistance, necessitating the return of the AUV to its departure point.

Future AUVs will also likely use sonar, lidar, and camera systems to mitigate ongoing issues of navigating the tumultuous ocean depths. The demand for AUV technology has slowly but steadily increased since its mass introduction in the 1980s and its diverse uses across myriad industries promises that the technology will continue to progress and remain in demand for the foreseeable future.

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