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Brighton Science Blog
Topic: Material & Supplier Quality Specifications
Surface Treatment of Thermoplastics for Aerospace Components
The Aerospace and Defense industry is booming. In 2024, global aerospace investments were nearly $1.2 trillion, with the United States accounting for nearly $450 billion in aircraft and space systems manufacturing. This rapid expansion is driven by technological advancements and rising demand for...
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5 New Ideas to Address Common Challenges Manufacturing Plant Managers Face
Leadership of a manufacturing plant demands exceptional skill. Plant managers navigate a dynamic landscape of ever-evolving responsibilities. Drawing on a decade of collaboration with hundreds of companies across countless operational challenges, we've identified key insights to help tackle these...
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Sustainable Manufacturing: How to Overcome the Hidden Obstacles Using Post-Consumer Recycled Plastics (PCR)
Many businesses within the industrial sector are pushing for sustainable manufacturing initiatives, but one of the biggest challenges in sustainability is dealing with plastics and their disposal. Some leading manufacturers, including a number of automotive companies, are introducing a new...
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The Water Break Test as a Surface Measurement Gauge
The water break test is a common way for manufacturers to test the surface cleanliness of metal surfaces. Compared to other legacy cleanliness tests, it is relatively simple to perform. However, the results rely almost entirely on the subjective eye of the person performing the test. Hydrophobic...
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Unlock Success in Adhesive Bonding: The Definitive Troubleshooting Guide
Manufacturers have numerous options at their disposal when it comes to preventing product failures resulting from imperfect adhesive bonding. Often, the approach is to simply accept adhesive bonding failures as part of the scrap rate and move on. In other cases, companies may completely revamp...
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What is Materials Science & Why is it Crucial for New Product Development?
Many people are not familiar with the subject matter and discipline of materials science because it’s not taught in elementary or high school and only infrequently at the university level. Instead, we are often taught chemistry and physics. Chemistry teaches us how atoms and molecules interact,...
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Surface Analyst Technology Replaces the Old Language of Dyne Ink
For over a decade, manufacturers and suppliers have spoken the language of dyne when dealing with surface preparation and treatment verification. Because the process of dyne analysis requires users to interpret the way the ink spreads on a surface, it is highly subjective, making the language of...
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How to Fix Common Causes of Adhesion Problems
Manufacturers often have a large blind spot regarding 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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Why Your Business Should Reject a Culture of 'Quick Fixes'
Quality gurus have long preached the importance of getting to the root of the problem. So why, then, when managers understand this so well, do organizations settle for the quick fix? It’s like taking a painkiller for a headache: the pain goes away for a while, but if there’s an underlying cause,...
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Top 6 Reasons Your Internal Organization Should Care About Surface Intelligence
Intelligence is a funny thing. On its face, it seems like the best way to gauge intelligence is to measure one's capacity for maximum knowledge intake through rote memorization of facts and figures. That sounds good, but it doesn't feel quite right. Because we all know knowledge that's just piled...
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Boost New Product Innovation Using Materials Science and Technology
Having the freedom to design and build to the limits of our imaginations is at the core of what makes us human. You must think outside the common practice to boost innovation and improve processes to accomplish this task.
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Why You Should Rethink Your Manufacturing Cleaning Process
In manufacturing, a final assembly is only as reliable as its constituent parts, the bonding or joining method used to hold them together, or the coating method used for corrosion protection and/or the final aesthetic touch. In order to guarantee the strength and successful performance of a...
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How Surface Intelligence Enables Data-Driven Decision-Making & Advances Business Growth
Formula 1 teams know that you must incorporate a tried-and-true process into your workflow to perform at the highest level. They practice a defined, repeatable, measured, tested, and continuously improve their processes to ensure that their level of performance is constantly increasing. This can be...
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How to Bring Reliability to Complex Aspects of Material Engineering
Materials science and engineering influence our lives daily and open the door to new innovations in manufacturing. Each time you wear pair of shoes, scroll on your smart device or use a golf club, you are interacting with a product that was produced using materials, adhesives, and coatings that...
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How to Quickly Qualify Suppliers and Make Changes with Confidence
Materials used to manufacture increasingly advanced and complex products have likewise evolved to be equally advanced and complex. As a result, it has become critical to understand the surfaces of these materials in order to optimize their ability to accept various paints, films, coatings, and...
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Why Automotive Glass Bonding Recalls Should be a Thing of the Past
Automotive glass is a technological marvel. Despite its clarity, much of how it's manufactured 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...
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The Solution to Costly Aircraft Paint Adhesion Failure
The importance of understanding surface quality and being able to measure it in an accurate, reliable, and demonstrable way is important for ensuring a high-quality finish and, ultimately, a high-quality product. Any manufacturer that is not able to do this increases their risk of producing...
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Top Challenges Product Development Teams Experience When Bringing a Product Concept to Manufacturing
Modern product development is fraught with challenges due in large part to the sophistication and complexity of the various elements that go into a final product – everything from materials and surface geometries to coatings, bonding, and even staff skills and competencies. Pitfalls await even the...
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Eliminate Surface Engineering Challenges & Design with Freedom
Oftentimes, to boost innovation and improve processes, you have to think outside the common practice. You have to take the restraints off of creativity. Freedom to design and build to the limits of our imaginations is at the core of what makes us human.
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What to do When Your Contact Angle is out of Spec
Adhesive bonding can be used to create strong, reliable assemblies that perform extraordinarily well in the field. It is a deceptively sophisticated process frequently used in complex manufacturing environments. It is imperative to take a holistic view of each step in a multi-phased production...
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The Best Method of Measuring Contact Angles for Reliable Manufacturing Processes
"Materials Science" sounds niche and even a little peculiar, but no manufacturer is a stranger to the implications of material science principles for building reliable products. Materials react with one another. Material properties impact how these interactions occur. Accurately anticipating and...
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Better Consumer Electronics Reliability: Coatings and Adhesives
In a recent study conducted by Instrumental, the top ten most common manufacturing defects were examined. The number one defect that manufacturers fight against is a deficiency in glue.
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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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Coatings on Car Sensors and Why We Don’t Have Driverless Cars Yet
Our relationship with our vehicles may have changed in the past few months, with the idea of commuting to work looking more like a shuffle to the desk across the room rather than a drive to the office across town. However, cars have not dropped in prominence in our society. With health risks now...
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Single vs Multi-fluid Contact Angle Techniques Part 2: Why one fluid is all you need for process control in manufacturing
This is part two of a two-part series explaining Brighton Science's approach to helping companies build reliability into their cleaning and adhesion processes through consultation and implementation of novel inspection equipment. These two articles are based on this technical paper written by Dr....
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Demystifying the Greatest Metal Brazing Process Challenges
When thinking about what manufacturing looks like, most people envision sparks flying, metal clanking, and fires blazing. This isn’t too far off the mark since metals were used to bond joints together to build larger, sturdier, and more stable structures before the first Industrial Revolution,...
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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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The 3 Crucial Elements for High-Performance Adhesion in Manufacturing
Excellent adhesion relies on the manufacturer’s ability to understand and control three distinct yet interrelated elements. In manufacturing, adhesive bonding takes many forms, but the fundamental principles of adhesion are always the same. Even if the application is metal joint welding, Parylene...
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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, you are also absolutely interested in cleaning the materials involved in the application. To get the most out of your cleaning operations, it’s imperative to know three things: What does clean...
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How to Transfer a Lab Surface Treatment Process to Production
Production processes don’t just materialize fully formed on the manufacturing floor. Procedures and operations go through a full research and development cycle, which can take years before they are integrated into the production line. This pre-production work includes strength, reliability, and...
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Gage Reproducibility and Repeatability (R&R) of the Surface Analyst™
Obtaining Quality and Consistency with the Surface Analyst Brighton Science's Surface Analyst™ uses a micro-liter of highly purified water to quantifiably measure contact angle. This objective measurement enables any user to obtain accurate results in either a pass/fail rating or a contact angle...
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Common Surface Energy Tests: Dyne Inks
For years, manufacturers have implemented a conventional method of testing surface energy using a solution called dyne inks. Dyne ink, when applied to a surface, can reveal the surface's adhesion potential. But there's an inherent problem with the inks themselves...
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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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