Case Studies

For this case study, we need to pack our bags and head to the airport!  As part of an infrastructure improvement initiative at a major northeastern airport, an industrial component distributor of ours received an invitation to quote parts to an equipment manufacturer who were themselves quoting to build new passenger boarding bridges for the project. 

Have you ever heard of “dry fog”? When we think of fog, we imagine the type of thick, wet fog that hugs the horizon on a cool winter morning – the type that brings traffic to a crawl and makes us late getting our kids to school. This type of fog coats everything it touches with water droplets, so we’d hardly call that “dry”. As it turns out, there’s a different type of fog made up of water molecules so small that they evaporate into the air without leaving any sign of moisture behind at all.

Industrial procurement has come a long way over the past decade, combining all sorts of technologies and processes intended to reduce a company's risk when they seek out goods and services. This is especially true in high-tech industries where the risk of bad solutions can be infinitely compounded by bad vendors.  We encountered this exact problem on a recent project, where an electron beam welding company (our client) needed help in bidding on an aerospace contract opportunity for an end user. 

Not long ago, we had only a vague idea of what the phrase ‘screen printing’ meant. We had a rough mental image of t-shirts and golf umbrellas printed with artistic company logos, but it was not until a recent project that we found out what industrial screen printing was all about first-hand. For this project, a new client introduced themselves as a manufacturer of advanced textile screen printing equipment, and asked for help solving a print quality concern they kept running into. As the client explained, the issue involved vacuum control and required a sensing solution to save them from the unexpected downtime and wasted prints their end-users were experiencing. At that, we knew we could help figure out a plan of attack and jumped into action.

Sometimes, even experts need help from their peers.  Fortunately in industrial automation fields, most of us are driven by serving our markets and clearing complex hurdles, naturally predisposing us all to linking arms when a collective challenge arises.  In early 2023, Whitman Controls was contacted by one of our instrumentation manufacturing peers to collaborate on a unique project involving hazardous gas analyzers used in the Oil & Gas industry.

Most of us working in industrial fields are endlessly impressed by large scale fluid applications, especially those that seem too complex or massive to comprehend. Intercontinental pipelines, hydroelectric dams, and municipal water treatment plants are just a few examples that come to mind. As impressive as these monstrous systems can be, there's ample reason to be equally inspired by applications on the opposite end of the spectrum, where miniscule amounts of fluids can be pumped accurately down to a fraction of a raindrop in volume. These are referred to as metering or dosing pump applications, and are found throughout industrial processes where they inject, transfer, and blend fluids with extreme, infinitesimal precision. Along these same lines, a premium national manufacturer of metering pumps reached out to Whitman Controls looking to add pressure and vacuum protection to their line of dosing pump systems, which made us think of a new twist on an old phrase: "go small or go home!"

Most readers will have a mental concept of surface mining, with big excavators and dump trucks zipping about a pit dug into the Earth in search of valuable materials such as copper, gold, and diamonds. We thought we had a good understanding of what open-pit mining entailed as well, until we learned just how big the equipment used in these operations really is. Not long back, we received an inquiry from a returning client looking to address an automation challenge with their hydraulic test rigs – rigs that exclusively tested mining equipment hydraulics used in large open-pit mines. As the client described their test rigs and the mining vehicles they served, we realized that our mental image of mining equipment was way too small. Luckily, even such large equipment and the test rigs that keep them in tip-top operation still use normal sized instrumentation. With that, we turned our attention to the client’s concerns about protecting their test rigs from significant, hazardous high pressure situations, and dug right in.

A prospective client requested Whitman's review of a new application they were working on involving industrial adiabatic cooling technology, seeking an analysis and recommendation on control sensor solutions that could fit into a new product lineup they were developing.  "Sure, we'll help," we said, "that sounds pretty cool."  Pun completely intended! 

Tuesday mornings are arguably the best possible time of the week to be reminded of high school science terms we haven't thought about for too many decades.  Or at least for one Tuesday morning in particular, in which we received an email asking about our experience in gas control for interferometry propagation.  We'll save you a Wikipedia search - lasers; they were referring to lasers.  This email was from a leading CO2 fabrication laser manufacturer looking for assistance in solving a gas mixture delivery challenge for an upcoming continuous laser marking application

Medical radiography equipment is highly prone to heat-induced outages and failures, so much so that most high-volume machines today come equipped with onboard active cooling systems. In a recent project, Whitman Controls was engaged by a client seeking automation support for their own line of x-ray tube cooling systems. Thinking about how much time could be saved in radiology waiting rooms everywhere if x-ray machines never overheated, we couldn't help but scrub in!