New Product Manufacturing Engineering

Along with innovative products come new manufacturing challenges. These challenges are met with engineering expertise in manufacturing process design and innovation. We tap into core competencies in the Innovative Product Engineering and Technologies organization and throughout SRI in systems and process engineering, manufacturing, automation, and tools design to develop innovative solutions and enabling technologies for cost-effective production.

• Rapid Prototype System
• Pharmaceutical Company
• Photoconductor Drum Manufacturer
• Custom-count Rotary Encoder
• Digital Tape Drive Transport

Rapid Prototype System
SRI was contracted by a leading rapid prototyping system manufacturer to help solve a challenging operational problem with its new rapid prototyping system: after several hundred hours of operation, the system would inexplicably "jam" and require expensive rebuilding. The company needed an immediate solution to avoid a product recall. SRI formed a team of chemists, fluid mechanics engineers, and product design engineers to evaluate the failure. SRI's fast response time and multidisciplinary approach to problem solving identified design and materials science inconsistencies that were the probable causes. SRI quickly performed a chemical analysis of consumable materials and identified chemical changes over time that were causing eventual system failure. SRI presented formulation and material changes that were incorporated to solve the client's problems.

Dry Powder Drug Formulation and Production Process

Needleless Powder Injection Drug Delivery

Pharmaceutical Company
A major OTC pharmaceutical company wanted to release a new line based on extensions of an existing product. They assumed that the same manufacturing processes could be used since the same materials were used in each product. The process was successful in the laboratory scale, but when applied to the 3000 gallon batch, filters pumps and valves malfunctioned because of the grit deposit. SRI formed a team of a mechanical engineer, a pharmaceutical formulation expert and a chemical engineer to examine the problem.After a 24 hour site visit, the SRI team was able to suggest formulation process changes that allowed the client to operate successfully and to release the new product on schedule.

Photoconductor Drum Manufacturer
An Asian joint venture had designed and built a photoconductor drum manufacturing plant that had both yield and product performance problems. The management felt that SRI's broad expertise and history of innovation in chemistry, photoconductors, printing technologies, and manufacturing processes could help fix the manufacturing problems. SRI tapped into its core competencies in these areas to identify solutions and manufacturing process changes that would allow the plant to meet customers' expectations. During the project, SRI changed the product coating formulation and some of the manufacturing processes to achieve industry standards. Based on the success, the client retained SRI as a strategic partner to develop new products and product improvements.

Digital Tape Drive Transport
SRI engineers worked for a major manufacturer of optical and magnetic tape-drive storage systems to reduce the production cost of a new cartridge tape drive. The company had developed an innovative product, but its production cost exceeded design projections. SRI formed a team of experts in storage device technology, manufacturing process engineering, and product development, and then worked closely with the client's manufacturing engineers to review mechanical design and manufacturing processes. SRI identified the key contributors to production costs and presented short-term and long-term process and product design changes. The company opted for a modified design that met production cost objectives

Custom-count Rotary Encoder
A major Japanese encoder manufacturer looked to SRI's core competencies in chemistry, materials, and optics to develop a machine to manufacture custom high-resolution optical rotary encoder disks as economically as mass-produced versions. SRI formed a multidisciplinary team that generated several preliminary designs. After a thorough evaluation and design review, SRI chose to develop the design that best met the selection criteria. During the design phase, SRI developed and tested a series of metallic and organic coatings that could be selectively removed with a 250-mW laser at a specified frequency. The result was a machine capable of writing 3-micrometer-wide lines with high contrast ratio.