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Process control sensors in Food & Beverage applications have a rough life.  Relentless cleaning with harsh chemicals, intentional large swings in operating conditions, and the perpetual demand to perform flawlessly or else real people might get real sick consuming compromised food products – you’d think it’d be a no-win situation for instrumentation manufacturers.

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.

Contract Manufacturers operate in a very interesting market space, where they apply a rather narrow range of specialized equipment and know-how to a seemingly endless array of projects for an ever-changing set of customers.  Companies that provide contract manufacturing typically specialize in a defined type of production – that is, a specific style, material, media, process workflow, scale, or discipline of work – but not on a single set end product, brand, or label.  In this article, we look at a few key interests of selecting instrumentation for contract manufacturing equipment.

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.  

Semiconductor manufacturing transforms raw silicon, polymers, and metallic materials into electrical transistor switching wafers using production equipment and processes that operate in spaces measured in nanometers.  At this scale, precision, accuracy, and fidelity are of the utmost importance. We provide a few examples of semiconductor manufacturing applications, each presenting unique demands onto their control system’s sensors.  

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.

Industrial manufacturers – along with the distributors and resellers that service them – are currently in the midst of a market transformation involving product availability, price stability, and access to reliable support. When a new standard is required, Whitman Controls delivers.

With the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Whitman Controls and its team of engineers collaborated with product development and design company Nectar to introduce a low-cost ventilator technology to underprivileged regions who desperately needed critical solutions.

In the mining industry, aftermarket process improvements are essential to enhance hydraulic equipment functionality. To guarantee proper pre-fill and optimize accumulator efficiency, a client partnered with Whitman Controls to design a highly customized fitting to ensure safety, reliability, and cost effectiveness. The client’s lead project engineer, collaborated directly with Michael and Whitman’s engineering team. In under 5 weeks, the team designed, fabricated, and delivered a prototype for testing. The Whitman switch exceeded the client’s expectations, and came in over 35% below their previous supplier’s offering.