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Brighton Science Blog
Topic: Surface Preparation & Treatment
Guess the Contact Angle: Plasma Treated Aluminum
So far in our Guess the Contact Angle Series, we have brought you three videos demonstrating how contact angle changes depending on the state of the material surface: Contact angle measurement on a piece of aged, 'as is' aluminum Contact angle measurement on aluminum after cleaning it with an IPA...
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How to Achieve Reliable Manufacturing by Controlling Surface Quality
When a material begins its journey through a manufacturing process it becomes crucial to know and control everything that happens to that material as it makes its way down the line. There are two major factors to consider when understanding and controlling what happens to the surface of that...
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How 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, use a golf club, you are interacting with a product that was produced using materials, adhesives, and coatings that work...
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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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How to Conceptualize and Design Products Using New Materials and Substrates with Confidence
Materials as technology is one of the most important fields in developmental science. As new materials are created and perfected, they proliferate and quickly spread to manufacturing centers around the world, spurring innovative product design. Rapid development of ceramic, sustainable materials,...
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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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The Solution to Costly Aircraft Paint Adhesion Failure
The importance of understanding surface quality and being able to measure it in an accurate, reliable, and demonstrable way is important for ensuring a high-quality finish and, ultimately, a high-quality product. Any manufacturer that is not able to do this increases their risk of producing...
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How to Get Help Finding the Root Cause of Adhesion Failure in Manufacturing
Adhesion, coating and bonding problems have a tendency to be persistent and resilient, causing frustration and can lead to costly rework, recalls, scrap, production delays and reputation loss, at worst. These problems often require more than manufacturers are currently equipped to handle on their...
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Guess the Contact Angle: Abraded Aluminum
So far in our Guess the Contact Angle Series, we have brought you two videos: the first one shows the Surface Analyst taking a contact angle measurement on a piece of aged, 'as is' aluminum. The second video asks you to guess the contact angle after we took the same piece of aluminum, but cleaned...
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BTG Labs evolves capabilities, leadership and name to become Brighton Science—bringing unmatched expertise to the emerging field of Surface Intelligence.
BTG Labs, a company that has spent the past 20 years solving critical adhesion issues and developing the world’s first surface inspection technology for leading manufacturers, has evolved its capabilities, leadership and name to become Brighton Science.
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Why Manufacturers Can’t Achieve Manufacturing Innovation Gains by Simply Purchasing Equipment
Innovation is a word you hear tossed around frequently in various industries. Many organizations pursue innovation relentlessly as the key to their success and to gain or maintain a competitive edge. But innovation can be elusive for organizations that don’t quite know how to support it. As a...
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How to Streamline the Product Development Lifecycle
As growing numbers of manufacturers embrace the principles of Industry 4.0, they are experiencing the benefits of its cornerstone concepts, including system and process integration, information transparency, and smart technology, all of which enable manufacturing across a variety of industries to...
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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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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 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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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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What to do When Your Contact Angle is out of Spec
Adhesive bonding can be used to create strong, reliable assemblies that perform extraordinarily well in the field. Adhesive bonding is a deceptively sophisticated process that is frequently used in complex manufacturing environments. It is imperative to take a holistic view of each step in a...
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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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Harnessing the Power of Water to Achieve Precise Results
Nature is miraculous. Living entities, be they plants, animals, marine life or humans, can perform an amazing array of complex tasks. As scientists, inventors, and engineers, we at BTG Labs take inspiration from any source that provides a good idea. We marvel at how the archerfish uses water to...
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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 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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How to Measure Surface Tension
The attractive force of the molecules present at the surface of a liquid towards each other is called the surface tension of that liquid. It may seem like a little thing (and in terms of mass, it doesn’t really get much smaller than the top few molecular layers that make up the surface of a liquid...
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What is the Difference Between Surface Tension and Surface Energy
Using adhesives in manufacturing is becoming increasingly common for building everything from massive machines to everyday tech devices. But companies' reliance on the science of adhesion to make sure their products work perfectly and look marvelous didn’t start there. In the centuries since the...
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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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Reduce Field Repairs Through Zero Defect Manufacturing
Quality control isn’t about preventing just the most egregious failure possibilities. It’s about setting high standards so that products are reliable for years. Control of quality standards for adhesive bonding of dissimilar materials plays a massive role in not only ensuring recalls and warranty...
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How to Reduce Medical Device Surface Testing Time and Subjectivity
Time is always of the essence for medical device manufacturers. When a medical breakthrough needs to make it to market there is no time to waste. There is also no margin for error. Medical device manufacturers are always working with doctors and scientists to experiment with profound new...
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Manufacturing Best Practices for Business Continuity Plans
Even though coming to the end of 2020 has not at all meant the end of the impact of Covid-19, manufacturers are pushing forward to make sure 2021 is not marred by the setbacks of this year. This has not been a normal economic downturn and the ways to remain resilient in the past are not enough to...
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What is the Best Surface Quality Inspection for Smart Manufacturing?
Manufacturing processes can, on the surface, appear to be an amorphous web of convoluted conveyors and machinating machinery. But taking a closer look through the eyes of a quality engineer reveals that the process that leads to reliable products is, in fact, itself a series of decisions, each...
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Reliable Wire Bonding Through Quality Data Collection for Industry 4.0
Wire bonding and sintering are critical processes involved in the manufacture of a majority of electronic devices. These processes are used to connect silicon chips, integrated circuits (ICs), and electrical components to their housings and boards. Wire bonding has become one of the most widespread...
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What Medical Device Manufacturers Need From Surface Cleanliness Testing
Quality tests during medical device production need to check a lot of boxes for manufacturers. Testing must increase confidence in product reliability in order to be worthwhile to manufacturers. What’s more, that confidence needs to be measurable and reportable because companies cannot tolerate...
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A Great Idea to Help Save the Aerospace Industry
2020 is a year that will live in infamy for many industries. We haven't even seen the full effect of Covid-19 on economies, which inserts a heap of uncertainty into decision making for manufacturers. But one thing is for sure: we're not going to get back to business as usual anytime soon. The ...
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Everything Breaks: What Reliability Means for Adhesively Bonded Products
The seemingly easy and obvious answer to the question implied in the title of this article is: reliability means no failures whatsoever forever and ever, amen. Sadly, it’s not quite so simple. For manufacturing engineers, reliability is an elastic concept that is particular to each and every design.
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Effective Strategies for Efficient and Reliable Manufacturing That Can’t Wait
Today, manufacturing requires a paradigm shift from reactionary whack-a-mole problem correction to taking a holistic approach. The mutually reliant elements of manufacturing are interwoven in both obvious and invisible ways. From supply chain communication to equipment dependability, and from ...
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The Huge Need for Zero Defect, Large Scale Molding Processes
Manufacturing large scale molded products such as pools, boats and aircraft parts is as herculean a process as the products they generate. Colossal molds are used to form fiberglass and other composites into aircraft wing panels, fuselages, boat hulls, bus shells and pools. The proper application,...
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Process Control Innovations for Card Manufacturers
We’ve all experienced the disappointing (and kinda embarrassing) moment when we’re at a register trying to buy armfuls of tortilla chips and salsa and the point of sale card reader screams out that an error has occurred. For credit and debit card manufacturers, these are the moments they want to...
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The Best Method of Controlling HMDS Use in Semiconductor Manufacturing
Semiconductors are one of the most fascinating areas of electronics manufacturing. The ability to “grow” almost irreducibly small integrated circuit components on silicon wafers has made an incredible amount of micronization possible. The theory has always been that as the chips got smaller, their...
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Surface Preparation for Reliable Optical Coatings in Photonics Manufacturing
Coatings are an indispensable part of manufacturing photonics. The coatings help determine the most basic functionality of the lenses they are applied to. How much light passes through, what happens to that light when it passes through the lens, does some light get absorbed, are some spectral...
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Ensuring the Durability of Oleophobic Coatings on Consumer Tech
We’re all thinking a lot more about the surfaces we touch and the invisible things that might be on those surfaces. Manufacturers have been thinking about how surfaces interact with our skin and the environment long before COVID-19 made us all much more cognizant of what we can get from touching...
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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 Know if Hydrophilic Coatings on Medical Devices Provide the Necessary Comfort for Patients
Comfort is more than just a nice thing to hope for when it comes to medical devices like tubing, catheters and stents that are implanted into the human body. Comfort, in this instance, is referring to the absence of pain. Having a piece of plastic or metal inserted into your body is never going to...
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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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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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How to Control Additive Blooming in Polymer Films
We all take the ease of peeling open, and resealing packs of double stuff Oreos for granted. The plastic packaging that maintains the freshness of our favorite snacks and foods has become so ubiquitous it doesn’t even register as existing, until we try to open that hotdog pack with our bare hands...
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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 the finer points of BTG Labs’ 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...
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Single vs Multi-fluid Contact Angle Techniques Part 1: Surface energy and the attractions between substances
This is part one of a two-part series explaining the finer points of Brighton Science's approach to helping companies build reliability into their cleaning and adhesion processes through consultation and implementation of novel inspection equipment. These two articles are based on this technical...
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Will New Hand Washing Practices Cause Problems for Manufacturing?
Like many industries during the COVID-19 crisis, manufacturing has had to make big changes including scaling back its workforce, enforcing new and intensified hygiene standards and taking a closer look at workplace cleanliness. Looking ahead to the permanent adjustments we’re all making, it’s...
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Study Proves the Surface Analyst is Dependable for Process Control
One of our favorite services we provide to manufacturers is to help optimize surface preparation techniques for their particular materials and products. It’s our specialty and one of our biggest passions. We feel so strongly about it because we know that if you, as a manufacturer, are able to...
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How to Get the Most Out of Your Vacuum Plasma Treatment
Vacuum plasma is the treatment method of record for many manufacturers. Not only because it is a legacy technology proven useful over many, many decades, but because it can be particularly effective at creating chemically reactive surfaces of various geometries that need to be bonded, coated,...
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A Summary of Surface Treatment Methods for Manufacturers
One of our many mantras here at Brighton Science is that all manufacturers who bond, coat, seal, paint and print stand a better chance of fully understanding and controlling their manufacturing process when it’s defined as an adhesion process. We believe this because adhesion is quite literally and...
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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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Topcoat to Primer Surface Reliability for Aircraft Painting
Adhesion problems don’t have a preference when it comes to the kind of damage they cause. Whether the end result is structural or cosmetic, headaches for manufacturers abound; although there are times where the issue doesn’t have to do with sunroofs detaching, electrical shorts or planes falling...
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Component Connection Failure Root Causes on ENIG PCBs
The field of printed circuit board finishing and bonding methods has been growing and diversifying for decades. The design of PCBs depends heavily on the use and environment of the electronic package, and those design decisions include what Surface Mount Technology (SMT) is employed. SMT involves...
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Surface Preparation for Primer Coating of Composites in Aerospace Applications
A lot goes into painting an aircraft. This massive, multi-stage process begins long before that final, shiny topcoat you see on the wings and tail is applied. The components are molded, then they’re prepared (which is often a multi-step process in-and-of itself), then they’re assembled, then there...
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Conformal Coating Failure Caused by Poor Surface Cleanliness
Electronic components consist of many exposed and delicate pieces that leave them vulnerable. A lot is relying on these fragile parts to function without fail. From implantable medical devices to navigational equipment and from sensor packages in cars to cell phones, the manufacturers of...
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Importance of Adhesion & Composites in Lightweighting Cars
One of the most pressing questions on the minds of manufacturing engineers is how to take a load off. Lightweighting, or shedding pounds on assembled vehicles and machinery, is a critical puzzle in aerospace, marine and, most acutely, in automotive industries. In fact, with the pressure to optimize...
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Surface Treatment of Thermoplastics for Aerospace Components
The Aerospace and Defense Industry is experiencing a market boom right now. Investments in the aerospace industry are an increasingly significant part of the world economy. Last year, almost $1 trillion was spent worldwide with about $400 billion spent directly on aircraft and space systems...
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The Tools & Skills to Address Adhesion Problems in Production
When adhesion issues become apparent in a manufacturing process, they can seem to come out of nowhere. When coatings on circuit boards delaminate and cause shorts; when automotive glass doesn’t properly seal and moisture is let through, or when implantable medical devices aren’t meeting cleanliness...
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The 3 Crucial Elements for High-Performance Adhesion in Manufacturing
Excellent adhesion relies on 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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Fundamentals of Adhesion & Why 3 Molecular Layers Matter
Adhesion is a powerful phenomenon that can hold massive structures together and fuse microscopic compounds. It is also extremely dependent upon delicate and fragile processes to succeed. In manufacturing, adhesive bonding takes many forms but the principles of adhesion are always the same. Even if...
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Best-practice Surface Preparation Processes for New Products
New Product Development is an essential component to the successful growth of companies who always challenge themselves to improve and innovate. Getting this design stage right is pivotal in that it sets in motion everything the product will be and how well it will perform. Yet, many new products...
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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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What is the Best Fast & Accurate Alternative to Dyne Testing?
Dyne solutions have been the most common method of quality checking material surface cleanliness for decades. Their ubiquity and low cost have led them to be heavily relied upon by manufacturers even though they are imprecise, destructive to surfaces and harmful to the user. The science behind...
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How to Know if a Manufacturing Surface is Treated or Untreated
In order to ensure successful bonding, coating, printing, painting, laminating or meet cleanliness standards in manufacturing, material surfaces must be manipulated. One such manipulation that gets surfaces ever closer to being ready for adhesion is surface treatment. There are many operations and...
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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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Secrets to Predicting Adhesion Failures in Production
When adhesion failure becomes apparent in manufacturing processes it can seem to come out of nowhere. Very often, there is no problem until suddenly there is. It feels unpredictable, unavoidable and like the best solution is to either eat the loss it brings or just hope it goes away as quickly and...
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Why a Surface Quality Inspection Process Ensures Adhesion
Manufacturing processes that involve bonding, coating, sealing, printing, painting, laminating or cleaning need a metric to measure the surface quality of the materials involved. Without such a metric it is impossible to predict whether the adhesion process will be successful or if it's on the path...
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TickTock: Impact of Time on Surface Preparation in Production
There are numerous obstacles to maintaining a material surface that is clean and fully prepared for adhesion in a manufacturing process. But there is one element that carries through the entire adhesion process and has a massive effect on the adhesion performance of the final product: TIME. Time...
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Why an Incoming Cleanliness Spec Ensures Vendor Compliance
Supply chain control is crucial to ensuring that the time, money and labor put into a production process doesn’t go to waste. Managing what comes into the production process has a massive impact on how effective and efficient the production process is ultimately going to be. For companies dealing...
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Why a Production Adhesion Process is Essential to Quality
What manufacturers know about the crucial role a successful adhesion process plays in a high-quality production operation and what manufacturers do about this fact can be widely divergent. Every manufacturer who bonds, seals, coats, paints or prints knows that in order to proclaim that a production...
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New and Better Surface Quality Test Than the Water Break
There are times when trying to discern if adhesion in manufacturing will succeed seems like a deeply mysterious and opaque puzzle. The water break test is a simple and fairly straight-forward method of detecting hydrophobic (water-repellant) contaminants on surfaces, most commonly on flat sheets of...
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Easy Ways to Find Manufacturing Adhesion Failure Sources
When adhesion failure plagues a manufacturing process it can be particularly disruptive. A production process may be humming along just fine and then it suddenly becomes clear that a coating is uneven, or paint is chipping (when it wasn’t before), or joints are weaker than they had been, or film is...
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How to Fix Common Causes of Adhesion Problems
Manufacturers often have a large blind spot when it comes to the causes of adhesion problems. This blind spot makes it impossible to solve these problems and generates frustration and loss rather than productivity and adhesion success. Taking the blinders off and taking on adhesion failure at its...
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10 Most Common Surface Quality Mistakes by Manufacturers
Manufacturers are constantly fighting against adhesion problems. Surfaces not sticking and adhesives not working is the daily reality facing manufacturers looking to make high quality, reliable products. The daunting nature of the task to eliminate adhesion failure seems insurmountable and...
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Corona Treatment Concerns You Need to be Taking a Closer Look At
Disclaimer: this article is NOT about COVID-19, it is about a surface treatment process for better adhesion in manufacturing. If you're looking for information about cleaning, here's an article that discusses the difference between biological cleanliness and chemical cleanliness: COVID-19:...
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How To Keep Up With the Changing Landscape of Advanced Materials
There's a logical fallacy akin to a "what's good for one is good for all" mindset that is devastating when applied to surface treatment in adhesion processes. Polymers are rapidly being developed and synthesized for niche applications to push the limits of current physical properties of materials....
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NASA and UVA Work with Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) to Co-Author Spectroscopy Journal Article
Brighton Science's Founder and Chief Scientist, Dr. Giles Dillingham and Research and Development Chemist, Brooke Campbell recently collaborated with NASA scientists and researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia on an article published in...
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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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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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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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Determining the Sweet Spot of Flame Treatment in Automotive Interior Parts
In 2014, a large manufacturer of automotive exteriors and interiors encountered a problem consistently adhering paint to their dashboards due to an inappropriate use of their flame treatment.
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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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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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How the Surface Analyst Improves Composites Performance
The utilization of composites increases daily in manufacturing as more ways in which to use this advanced material are discovered. Composite is a smart material that provides a lighter weight and stronger product. This advanced material is being used in many different industries, from consumer...
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Surface Treatment Processes: Flame Treatment
Flame treatment is a surface activation treatment process used to chemically modify a surface for better adhesion. This process is typically used on low energy surfaces that can be difficult to adhere to, such as plastics and composites. The treatment is also very gentle, posing low risk to the...
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Surface Analyst Technology Replaces the Old Language of Dyne
Smarter Surface Processes 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,...
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CMH-17 Composite Materials Handbook: Validating Surface Preparation
Ongoing Advancements in the Field of Composite Materials Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) maintains an important connection to CMH-17, the Composite Materials Handbook. Brighton Science's special connection began in 2004 when Giles Dillingham, Founder and Chief Scientist read that CMH-17...
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Automotive Series: Surface Preparation of Composite Surfaces
Building a More Fuel-Efficient Automobile The pursuit to produce a more fuel-efficient automobile does not rely solely on the efficiency of the engine. A great amount of fuel efficiency gains are possible not because of improvements to engine design, but because of improvements in materials....
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Contact Angle Analysis: Sealing Surface of Aluminum Castings
Surface Requirements of Aluminum Castings Automotive manufacturers widely utilize aluminum castings as the most successful way to create aluminum parts. However, this process can involve inorganic contaminants on the surface which interfere with potential bonding, sealing, or coating. Scientists at...
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Qualification of Surface Preparation Processes for Bonded Aircraft Repair
The two principle materials used in aircraft manufacturing, metals and polymers, tote particularly reactive surfaces. This leaves them highly susceptible to contamination. As adhesive bonded repairs become more and more popular in the industry, knowing and understanding surface preparation and...
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