ProSensus, which has a staff of 15, has been working for the past year on the development of FormuSense and is close to releasing the product. The firm said the software offers a "no-code platform" designed to speed up the development process through:
- reducing lab time through simulation;
- speeding up formulation time;
- addressing new safety regulations, sustainability initiatives and customer complaints; and
- improving knowledge retainment and broadening research and development resourcing.
Cardin said it helps users take advantage of work and data collected in the past. Normally, a lab may only work on one experimental area at a time. But if the goal is to change the molecular weight of a particular elastomer, FormuSense can combine all the data the user has generated in the past for use in the experiments.
"They can go back to the model that has all the data behind it and get a starting point for the compound of mixture that they want to make," Cardin said.
The software helps with data cleaning and assembly, and provides modeling to aid with predictive analytics. "It will help them do fewer experiments and spend less time in the lab, because they can get a nice starting point from where they worked in the past," she said.
How close a user can get to a finished product from the modeling depends on how good the data was that had been collected. While the software is commercial in nature, the data used still is unique to each customer.
"If their data spanned a huge range in the past, it will be very close. If their data was very limited, it won't be," Cardin said.
Besides touting FormuSense at the ACS Rubber Division's IEC, ProSensus held a webinar on the subject in October, and is launching a beta release program to gain feedback to determine what needs changed before it starts selling licenses. To this point, the firm mainly has been working with past customers because they will have data collected and ready to go.
Some potential users have been quite excited by the new software, but a downside, Cardin said, is that a number of venture capitalists have been releasing software and over-promising potential results.
"We kind of take a more conservative route," she said. "You have to check the data first. We're not going to promise you that in two weeks all your problems will be solved. So many software companies are out there and they are over-promising, and engineers and formulators are getting skeptical. It's impossible to live up to those promises."
ProSensus has a diverse customer list that, besides rubber, includes chemicals, foods, pharma and steel.
Among its rubber-related offerings are machine vision solutions; BaleGuard surface inspection for rubber bales; and CrumbGuard inspection for rubber crumb.
