Along with other members of The Giving Circle, Frank is now in Uganda to help bring needed resources to an orphanage. Among other things, he’ll be designing and building a small windmill. Of course, that gives us two weeks to setup a few practical jokes for him.
As part of the V&V test procedure, we designed a gravimetric means to characterize the volumetric and flow-rate accuracy of a couple of precision injection instruments. With this setup, we’re able to achieve measurement resolution of just 0.1 milligram and reduced the error due to water evaporation to 40 times better than using a mineral oil emulsion.
We attended the BIO 2010 conference to learn more about the confluence of the pharmaceutical and medical device industries in the growing field of personalized medicine. Based on the crowds at the conference and the encouraging stance of the FDA, there is a movement to bring us instrument geeks into the pharmaceutical business.
On the radio I heard about a device that several students at Rice created to help diagnose anemia in the developing world. The device acts as a centrifuge to separate the blood into red blood cells and plasma in just 10 minutes and without the use of electricity.
Last week I attended the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s (BIO) 2010 conference in Chicago, where I learned that the biotech industry thinks Maryland is a great place to do business, and it’s on track to get better.
Key Tech accomplishes prototyping by leveraging a network of approximately three dozen prototyping vendors, selecting the method and vendor based on the best match to your application. Multiple suppliers keep us current with the state of the art technologies and allow for flexibility and speed in the prototyping process.
Prototypes are essential to testing system performance. However, due to the current technological constraints of creating microscale prototypes, compromises in the characteristics of the prototype usually must be made, which can lead to unforeseen, expensive problems on the production line. Fortunately, basic, fundamental models of significant aspects of the system (first-principles modeling) can be “calibrated” through the use of focused CFD models and empirical data. The result is improved models that allow the designer to bridge the knowledge gap between paper and production.
You’d probably like to hear that Key Tech has already built a product just like yours, but if that were true, you might not end up with much competitive advantage in the marketplace. Instead, we go to great lengths to hire and retain talented engineers who seek out new challenges.
Do you know how an atomic force microscope works? You can satiate your curiosity and impress your friends with all kinds of intellectual knowledge by watching just one of the many open-courses freely available online. Educate yourself.
Say you want to be a veterinarian. You’ve got to get to know a lot of animals in school, both inside and out. That requires a lot of time in the library, but eventually you have to get your hands dirty and actually touch some animals. Fortunately for the next generation of vet students, the days of putting your hand up a cow’s butt in vet school may be over, thanks to a little area of research known as Haptics.
