A product is only as good as the sum of its components. Whether you’re a chef hunting for the freshest ingredients, or an electrical engineer looking for the highest quality parts, you take care in selecting components because you don’t want the quality of your product to suffer from one bad ingredient or part. When […]
Analytical Services: Blog Posts and Resources
Using Material Testing to Troubleshoot Quality Problems
Product quality is paramount to the success of a business. Competing on price, promotion, or placement can only happen once the product’s objective and subjective quality reaches a sufficient level. Material testing can be used to identify product flaws, and reveal opportunities to improve overall product quality, increasing the potential returns for the business. The […]
Scanning Electron Microscopy: a Tool for Science and Business
For decades, scanning electron microscopy has helped stretch the boundaries of understanding of the world around us for scientists and non-scientists of all ages. Showing magnified images of materials and objects helps bring context to the world we all live in. Scanning electron microscopy is an analytical testing method that captures high resolution images of […]
How Material Testing Supports Good Manufacturing Practices
Product quality and safety is of the utmost importance for all manufacturers. Good, safe products are part of doing good business. But for manufacturers of products such as drugs, cosmetics, medical devices and some food items, ensuring product quality and safety is also part of compliance with Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards. GMP standards are […]
Your Guide to Discovering What Type of Materials Testing You Need to Solve Product Quality Issues
As a quality assurance specialist, you’re trained to spot quality issues and product defects. You know that if the fit isn’t right or the specified color mixture is slightly off, you need to find the cause and a solution to fix it. However, quality control is difficult when there’s an unknown contaminant on your products […]
Guess the Materials Characterization Technique Part II
When unknown contaminants appear on your products due to failures in manufacturing processes, there are techniques that can help you identify the cause of the issue. Materials analysis laboratories use materials characterization to analyze and reverse engineer unknown materials to discover their composition. In our last post, we brought up four issues and asked you […]
Guess the Materials Characterization Technique
As a manufacturing quality engineer, your goal is to deliver uniform, defect-free products that provide consistent performance. While you expect things to be done right the first time, unforeseen mistakes are inevitable. If there is a defect in a final product, you must find the source of the failure as quickly as possible in order […]
Materials Analysis Solves Manufacturing Mysteries
When a manufactured electrical switch unexpectedly experienced a series of shorts, quality assurance personnel noticed several abnormal particles within the switch. Because these particles were the only abnormality apparent on the product, and the QA team could not readily define where they came from, the manufacturer decided to submit the particles for materials analysis. This […]
7 Signs that it’s Time for Materials Testing
As an engineering or manufacturing lead for your business, you have enough to do without trying to troubleshoot a mysterious product failure. From staffing issues to inventory and manufacturing to fulfillment, a product failure due to contamination or unexpected out gassing in transit is the last thing you want to hear about. Luckily there materials […]
Prevent Microcontamination Issues with Cleanliness Testing
It’s 2:16 AM and the presentation that you’ve been working on all week is nearly done. There are only two more slides left to animate and…? Your laptop suddenly freezes, shows a bright blue screen and the unsaved file is lost. The circuitry in the 6 month old computer has failed due to microcontamination. Now, […]
