Brooks Instrument Blog

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…

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…