Brooks Instrument Blog

In just two weeks, Brooks will set up shop at the 2012 Fuel Cell Seminar & Exposition. This year’s event will be held at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn. Stop by booth 211 and say hello to me and other Brooks reps, as we talk about our ongoing innovations in flow instrumentation for fuel cell manufacturing, and demo some of our mass flow controllers. Contact me to schedule a demo of our mass flow controllers, and you’ll receive a 4 GB USB drive in the shape of a Brooks GF 40/80 Series MFC.

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I was perusing Control Global’s website this morning, (an aside – they have GREAT stuff on their site, check it out if you haven’t been there before) and ran across a new white paper discussing thermal mass flow meters. It reminded me of an important distinction we commonly discuss with customers: inferred mass flow measurement vs. direct mass flow measurement.

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Winning Control Global’s Readers Choice Awards is probably one of the best awards that we can win because the winners are chosen by the users of instrumentation. You can check out the full press release about this here, but below is the gist.

Brooks was honored in three categories, variable area flowmeter, positive displacement flowmeter and thermal mass flowmeter. For variable area flow meter, this was the 15th consecutive year we have place 1st in this category. And for positive displacement flow meter, this is the 18th consecutive year we have placed 1st. Quite an achievement if I do say so myself! For thermal mass flow meter, we placed 4th this year.

Thanks to Control Global and a special thank you to all the readers of Control Magazine that voted for Brooks!

After posting the blog about Brooks’ history with NASA this morning, I realized that this blog post about our Quantim’s in space must have been mistakenly deleted at some point, so here it is! Enjoy!

Delivering saline solution to a clinic for medical needs … sounds simple enough, right? Not when that clinic is on the International Space Station, the moon or even Mars. Transporting medical fluids that are manufactured on Earth into space is expensive and logistically challenging. NASA Johnson Space Center knew there had to be a way to manufacture medical fluids in space to alleviate the transportation problems and to make spacecraft more self sufficient, so they called on the microgravity science expertise and spaceflight hardware development know-how of Cleveland, OH based NASA Glenn Research Center and ZIN Technologies, Inc.

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While we were cleaning out our offices a few weeks ago a co-worker of mine handed me a great Norman Rockwell oil painting that we used to have hanging in one of our hallways. It was taken down when we were updating our facility. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. The reason we used to have it hanging up in the walls at Brooks (and the reason I’m going to find it another nice home on our walls) is because in the background of the picture you can see some Brooks Sho-Rate variable area flow meters between the two men on the left. Brooks provided Sho-Rate flow meters to  NASA for some of the first missions into space. Read more…

We always like to take the opportunity to share our customer success stories. Here’s one from the land Down Under where Brooks worked with Measurement Plus Pty. Ltd. to install a new gas mixing system at a research institute in Melbourne.

Researchers at the institute were using N2, CO, CO2 and Ar to stabilize a reaction chamber. However, at some point during the process, they wanted the ability to flow in a mixture of these gases. At the time, the institute was using older Brooks thermal mass flow meters inside a self-designed panel. The panel and its components were about 30 years old, rusted and looked like a bird’s nest. Read more…

Last week a co-worker of mine was cleaning out some old marketing demos and found the beauty pictured below. This is an old Full-View variable area flow meter. We took guesses amongst ourselves as to what year this was manufactured. The product manager, Jim Dillon, had to find out. So he went and pulled technical microfilm … that’s right, I said microfilm! It took a a few days because the machine to read the microfilm needed a new fuse. This was turning into quite the project!!! Well … we found out the year. You can see the order form pictured below. I blocked out any indication of what year this was produced. Can you guess?

Take a guess before the year is through (deadline is 12/31/11) and the first ten (10) responders that guess the correct year this product was produced will win a 4GB memory stick shaped like our new GF40/80 thermal mass flow meter/mass flow controller.

Yesterday, during the Chem Show in New York City, our very own Steve Kannengieszer was interviewed by Chemical Processing magazine‘s Senior Digital Editor, Traci Purdum. We’re still waiting for the video but I thought I would share some of the Q&A’s that were covered. If you are at the Chem Show, stop by and see us at booth 303! Read more…

It’s time for the Chem Show again. For Brooks, it’s nice that this show is right around the corner from our headquarters in Hatfield, PA … just a simple train ride up to New York. I’m looking forward to the Chem Show and if you are going, be sure to stop by our booth, booth #303.

We have a lot of new stuff to share with everyone at the Chem Show this year. We have our new vacuum capacitance manometers, the CMC and XacTorr Series vacuum capacitance manometers. These capacitance diaphragm gauges incorporate industry-leading features to improve measurement reliability, minimize drift, resist diaphragm contamination and minimize thermal effects in vacuum measurement applications. Read more…