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Brighton Science Blog
Topic: Cleaning Processes
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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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 on-going monitoring....
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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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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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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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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
Today’s blog post is the first of a two-part series focusing on plasma. In today’s post, with the help of Rose Roberts, Ph.D., Senior Custom Applications and Materials Engineer, we are going to review plasma basics and discuss how plasma can be used for both cleaning and surface activation. We will...
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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 of...
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BTG Labs Earns ISO 9001:2015 Certification Demonstrating Commitment to High Quality Standards
Cincinnati, OH - BTG Labs, the industry leader in industrial cleaning, surface treatment, and adhesion process control, has earned ISO 9001:2015 Certification. Internationally recognized as the standard for quality management, ISO 9001:2015 certification signals to customers that BTG Labs’ entire...
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Henkel and Brighton Science Partner to Establish Surface Measurement Standards
Highly engineered products, such as radar, guidance, and communication systems for commercial and defense aerospace applications use highly engineered materials when building products. As a supplier of sophisticated adhesives used in these high-end applications, it is not enough to merely sell...
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Contact Angle Measurements Can Be Used With Statistical Analysis To Predict Surface Quality
The use of contact angles to measure surface quality has been widely adopted throughout many industries and applications. Your organization, too, has recognized that contact angle measurements provide consistent and objective results in determining whether a surface has been properly prepared for...
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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 and 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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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 on to your material without doing anything to prepare that surface. What ISN’T...
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What are Surfactants and How Do They Impact Surface Tension?
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...
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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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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. Glues, epoxies, coatings and other adhesives are coming alongside or...
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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. Shoes were once ubiquitously leather or firm...
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How Surface Sensitive Measurements Help Medical Device Manufacturers Avoid Regulatory Bottlenecks
The pathway to zero defect manufacturing through 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. The variables in manufacturing...
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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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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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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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How to Use Contact Angle Measurements to Dramatically Reduce Scrap
Predicting production outcomes in manufacturing relies on accurate data that calculates the variables that actually matter to things like reliability, performance and longevity of the product. There are countless tests to examine every conceivably measurable aspect of production. Metrology is...
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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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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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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 lower density, better temperature tolerance and...
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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 appearance and how to guarantee structural integrity through common usage of the products. These...
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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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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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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 overmolding encapsulation need to remain sealed and impervious to the environment. To accomplish this, manufacturers of...
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Covid-19: Biological vs. Chemical Contamination in Manufacturing
Lately, the whole world has been having variations on 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. At BTG Labs we...
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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. Cleaning as a means to...
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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 are encapsulating 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...
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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. Mike is an electronics components and assemblies cleaning expert, whose mission is to make...
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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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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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Best Approach to Adhesion Failure Root-Cause Analysis
There are a lot of options available to manufacturers who are trying to prevent product failures caused by imperfect adhesion. Many times the plan of attack is to budget adhesion failures into the scrap rate and consider the job done. In other, more dramatic instances, companies will overhaul their...
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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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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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Expert 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 automotive and machining sectors the word used is often cleaning....
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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 to eliminate adhesion failure seems insurmountable and...
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How to Get the Most out of Industrial Parts Washers
Parts washers are the heavy-duty, hardworking machines that have become irreplaceable staples in any automotive or machined part manufacturing process. As manufacturing processes have become more sophisticated, the industries using parts washers includes not only industrial metals and aerospace...
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4 Common Factors that Impact Conformal Coating Adhesion
The pervasiveness of electronics in every manufacturing industry has provided unique challenges. Manufacturers are tasked with protecting these components in environments that make electronics vulnerable to even minute amounts of moisture, debris and environmental contamination. A useful solution...
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What Happens if You Don't Continually Monitor Your Adhesion Process?
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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What Does Clean Mean?
Coating and adhesive bonding are extremely common manufacturing process steps. It may seem obvious, but to ensure success in these applications, surfaces must be properly cleaned or manufacturers run the risk of bonding and coating failures. Simple enough, but if that's all there is to it then why...
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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 water contact angle obtained optically as viewed from the side. This method effectively...
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Surfactant Detection and 9 Other Surface Measurement "Hacks"
Brighton Science's Surface Analyst is more than just a fast, easy, accurate, hand-held, non-destructive, objective surface cleanliness gauge. It encompasses features to personalize your application for measuring on different parts and for different purposes. Because we work in highly diverse...
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How Clean, is Clean Enough?
Manufacturers often encounter a similar puzzle, when cleaning invisible contaminants from a surface, how do you know when the surface is clean; how clean is clean enough? This is a common question that manufacturers ask when preparing their surfaces for bonding, coating, sealing, printing or...
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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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Spring Cleaning: Brighton Science Style
It’s the first day of spring. Depending on where you live, this could mean opening the windows, planting seeds, rolling out the motorcycle, and waiting for Opening Day. Here at Brighton Science, we think of spring cleaning. Of course, this usually generates visions of humming vacuums and sloppy...
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Infographic: The Surface Analyst vs. Water Break Tests and Dyne Ink
In manufacturing there exist critical surface preparation process requirements to ensure products are safe and reliable. There are some legacy tests to determine if these requirements are being met and that the cleaning has been sufficient to ensure strong adhesion for coating, bonding, sealing,...
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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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