Case Studies

Integrated Circuits (or ICs) are the root of most of the technology we rely on in our daily lives, from mobile phones to internet data center servers to communication satellites in orbit. For commercial and industrial businesses, ICs provide the computational power found in all automated equipment and software systems as well. Manufacturing ICs falls within the domain of the semiconductor industry, where all circuit boards, processing chips, and transistor arrays are produced.

Many of us have been guests at an outdoor event where we might have felt it a little too cold outside, our minds silently urging the happenings along so that we could get back to the warmth indoors. No matter if it’s a wedding, a concert, a community church event, a work social hour, or any other of a thousand different types of entertainment event held outside, we all can appreciate the desire to get out of the elements and back into a nicely conditioned space.

Taking a wetland vehicle out into a marsh can be daunting.  Looking out at miles of open marsh, you get the same feeling as gazing deep into forested mountains or across towering ocean waves – it’s wild country, and making it back safely is solely up to you and the equipment you bring along. No matter what mission you’re on, the vehicle you select is likely the most important decision involved.  Wetland vehicles are a special breed of off-road equipment that must excel in widely varying conditions, all while serving a multitude of challenging functions reliably and safely. 

If readers ever need a reminder that workplace accidents can occur at any time, from any source, without warning, breezing through the OSHA Catastrophic Accident database will surely do the trick. Responding to an uptick in accidents involving compressed gas cylinders, this is exactly what one of our long-time distribution customers did in searching for ways that they could help reduce their end-users’ risk.

At an inspection rate of 300 glass bottles per minute, our customer’s continuous inline inspection platform carries responsibility for making a instantaneous pass-or-fail decision on a single bottle every two-tenths of one second.  When a ‘fail’ decision is computed, a series of pneumatic cylinders and positioners isolate the suspect bottle, move it to a reject conveyor outfeed, and hold spacing on the remaining bottles so that inspections continue seamlessly. How did we protect the system from control air supply upsets? Find out the four ways we solved this challenge.

A recent customer contacted Whitman to discuss a solar-powered water pump application.  This client designs and manufactures solar pump systems intended to be deployed anywhere in the world where sunlight shines and water needs to flow.  A necessary technical feature of these systems was that they would automatically shut down should they lose incoming water flow, and that was all we needed to know to determine that we could help.

Recently, a midstream energy producer contacted Whitman to discuss an application that sought to optimize these proportions towards cleaner burning, more efficiently produced end-products. The issue at hand was inaccurate, high cost, high maintenance level control in the distillation feed tanks. Good thing custom level control is right up our alley!

Medical testing is a fascinating industry segment that sits squarely at the crossroads of human biology, clinical laboratory science, and industrial engineering. This OEM faced a series of large projects to help their customers (medical device contract manufacturers) scale up operations, and Whitman was eager to explore ways to help both the OEM and the end users in one fell swoop.

Producing the semiconductor chips found in electronics from mobile phones to space-faring satellites today is the result of building circuits at a nanoscopic scale, where chemical reactions deposit or decompose into desirable material films that make up switching transistors and planar conductivity circuits in silicon wafers.  A leading semiconductor equipment manufacturer recently engaged Whitman Controls to provide instrumentation for a new generation of their production machinery, specifically in the form of evacuation control for the vacuum chambers on their atomic layer deposition equipment.  

When the Medical Device industry was faced with either finding new ways to produce its equipment or leaving medical professionals without the life-saving devices they required, several key OEMs turned to Whitman Controls’ Strategic Instrumentation Sourcing practices for answers.