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Brighton Science Blog
Topic: Quality & Mfg. Operations
The Knowing Doing Gap: How to Avoid Widespread Adhesion Issues
At Brighton Science, we talk about surface intelligence and how it can be used to optimize manufacturing processes from the earliest stages. In response, organizations often say, “Great! That’s the key to solving, preventing, and controlling bonding issues, right? But do we have surface...
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Posts by Topic
How Surface Intelligence Can Improve Your Return on Investment
“For every company, its competitiveness comes from its ability to assimilate knowledge and failure - which I tell my kids all the time - failure is an opportunity to learn and feedback is a gift. And if we take the 'quick fix' we take the learning off the table.” Andy Reeher, CEO, Brighton Science
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The Top 5 Things Product Development Teams Need to Know About Real-World Manufacturing Challenges
Roles matter. Everyone within an organization is responsible for producing the most excellent and reliable new products in manufacturing. There is one downside to this - it can lead to siloed thinking. It can even discourage a common language between design teams and technicians dealing with...
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Why Your Business Should Reject a Culture of 'Quick Fixes'
Quality gurus have long preached the importance of getting to the root of the problem. So why, then, when managers understand this so well, do organizations settle for the quick fix? It’s like taking a painkiller for a headache: the pain goes away for a while, but if there’s an underlying cause,...
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Why a Surface Chemistry Input Should be Included in New Product Specifications
When development teams are looking to build a new product that includes a coating, bonding, painting, or sealing process, it's only natural to consider what kind of adhesive, coating, or paint will perform the best. While these selections are critical to the end product's success, development...
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What Does Surface Intelligence Look Like in Action?
Surface condition is a significant driver of process and product reliability. It affects every part of the product life cycle, from development to launch, and its impact continues for as long as the product remains in service. When manufacturers try to compress development lead times, eliminate...
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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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What The Adhesives Technical Data Sheets Don’t Tell You About Successful Bonding
Manufacturers are using more and more adhesives, and the applications where they’re being used are more critical every year. Consequently, the cost of failure of adhesively bonded products is growing. Users of adhesives are aware that bond failures can occur, but they may not know why. Adhesive...
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Fail Early, Fail Often: How Predictive Modeling Allows Teams To Quickly Assess And Correct Adhesion Failure In Product Development
What Does Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Intelligently Even Mean? When it comes to business and innovation, making mistakes is inevitable. But instead of shying away from failure, we should embrace it as an opportunity to learn and grow. This concept is often referred to as "fail fast, fail often,...
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How to Achieve Reliable Manufacturing by Controlling Surface Quality
When a material begins its journey through a manufacturing process it becomes crucial to know and control everything that happens to that material as it makes its way down the line. There are two major factors to consider when understanding and controlling what happens to the surface of that...
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What Is the Role of Surface Chemistry in Industry?
Manufacturing has become increasingly complex with the fusion of technologies that are blurring distinctions between the digital, physical, and biological worlds. Physical products and services have transformed significantly due to enhancements made possible by digital capabilities. New...
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How to 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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How to Get Help Finding the Root Cause of Adhesion Failure in Manufacturing
Adhesion, coating and bonding problems have a tendency to be persistent and resilient, causing frustration and can lead to costly rework, recalls, scrap, production delays and reputation loss, at worst. These problems often require more than manufacturers are currently equipped to handle on their...
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Top 5 Trends in Products & Manufacturing Today
Change is perhaps the one absolute constant in manufacturing. Developments - in materials, processes, machinery, testing, products, markets and thousands of other things that affect manufacturing companies - happen every day. To remain cutting edge, optimally efficient, positively adaptable, and...
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Leveraging the Variability in Contact Angle Measurements to Improve Surface Quality and Process Control
Determining whether your material surface has been adequately cleaned or prepared for bonding, coating, sealing, painting, or printing requires the ability to objectively quantify the chemical and physical characteristics of the top few molecular layers: this is where all the action is. Water...
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How to Master Industrial Adhesion with Scientific Predictability
Manufacturers who produce products with surfaces that require paints, adhesives, or sealants face a challenge in determining the quality and reliability of the final product. The problem is often caused by the fact that most manufacturers don’t have complete control over three critical elements of...
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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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How to Achieve Zero Defect Manufacturing: The Promise of Industry 4.0
It’s a common fallacy to assume we have a handle on the future based on past or present circumstances. If 2020 has collectively taught us anything, the bright shiny lesson is likely that we should never be so hubristic to assume we can know what challenges the future holds. A second lesson, which...
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Using Data to Improve Ink Adhesion to Polymer Film
One of the most frustrating aspects of experiencing a problem in manufacturing isn't necessarily the issue itself, but rather, it's the difficulty of accurately determining and communicating what the problem actually is. In the case of blown and extruded polymer films (and many other manufacturing...
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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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Coatings on Car Sensors and Why We Don’t Have Driverless Cars Yet
Our relationship to our vehicles may have changed in the past few months with the idea of commuting to work looking more like a shuffle to the desk across the room rather than a drive to the office across town. However, cars have not dropped from their prominence in our society. With health risks...
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The Dangers of Missing Vital Surface Quality Information in Production
A major problem for manufacturers is a problem of sensitivity. There is a rampant lack of sensitivity to material surfaces for companies across every manufacturing industry. Granted, it’s not easy to test surface quality to predict the outcomes of common manufacturing processes like adhesive...
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Verification vs. Validation for Medical Device Product Quality Assurance
Validation and verification are inextricable from product development and process design for the manufacturing of medical devices. To satisfy regulatory standards, reduce risk, create efficiencies and ensure outcomes, manufacturers have ever-evolving validation and verification procedures. New...
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The Best Way to Verify Medical Diagnostics Coatings
The biomedical industry runs on testing. Testing is at the heart of meeting extensive requirements to ensure healthcare practices and facilities are safe. A kind of testing that has been on all of our minds lately is the kind of testing that analyzes the presence of diseases. Often these tests...
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Surface Preparation for Primer Coating of Composites in Aerospace Applications
A lot goes into painting an aircraft. This massive, multi-stage process begins long before that final, shiny topcoat you see on the wings and tail is applied. The components are molded, then they’re prepared (which is often a multi-step process in-and-of itself), then they’re assembled, then there...
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The Tools & Skills to Address Adhesion Problems in Production
When adhesion issues become apparent in a manufacturing process, they can seem to come out of nowhere. When coatings on circuit boards delaminate and cause shorts; when automotive glass doesn’t properly seal and moisture is let through, or when implantable medical devices aren’t meeting cleanliness...
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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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How to Control Your Adhesion Process by Getting to Know Your Critical Control Points
What is a Critical Control Point? A Critical Control Point (CCP) is any point in the manufacturing process where the surface condition of a material has the opportunity to change—intentionally or unintentionally—and impact adhesion, in a positive or negative way.
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Deck the Hulls: Preparing Ship Hulls for Coating and Painting
Manufacturing a product to withstand the environmental stresses of wind, rain, and sediment is challenging enough. But, when you add saltwater and wave action to the mix, the detrimental threat of corrosion increases significantly. A coating adhesion test is important for quickly testing a surface...
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On the Surface: An Overview of Surface Types and Measurement Challenges in Manufacturing
Of all the challenges manufacturers face, creating and optimizing critical surface processes for various materials can be very difficult. Traits such as location, size, shape, and texture can add to the challenge. The success of any critical surface process requires an in-line, fast, easy, and...
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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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The Role of Brighton Science's (formerly BTG Labs) Surface Analyst in the Development of the F-35 Lightning II
With the exciting release and testing of the F-35 Lightning II, Brighton Science swells with pride over its involvement in the development of this remarkable aircraft. The F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office recently released a booklet of Small Business Success Stories to share the involvement...
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