Shimadzu: Helping companies measure success

PITTSBURGH—Measure twice and cut once might seem like the first line in a Carpentry 101 textbook, but it gets a little more complicated in the world of scientific material testing instruments.

In the case of the century-old Shimadzu Scientific Instruments Inc., the English proverb might well be extended to "measure twice, then pull, stress, heat, X-ray and sometimes completely destroy" a sample as many times as required until answers are achieved.

With its core technologies in mass spectrometry and biotechnology, applied in drug discovery, medical research and regenerative medicine, Shimadzu also works in optical measurement technologies and AI solutions, according to William Gabler, senior applications scientist for the Kyoto, Japan-based company.

Gabler, along with a couple of the company's more common universal mechanical testing machines, were on hand in Pittsburgh at this year's International Elastomer Conference, conducted Oct. 4-7 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

"We don't focus solely on the rubber industry but rather on overall material testing, thermal analysis, spectroscopy, elemental analysis and life science testing for a range of industries," Gabler said. "We really run the whole gamut of testing."

From tires to non-tire rubber properties, consumer goods to architectural applications, just about every industry requires the characterization of material properties, as those properties are directly related to performance.

Focusing on common techniques in Pittsburgh, like tensile testing and fatigue threshold analysis, Gabler said Shimadzu can unveil the properties of rubber and other compounds, analysis that has importance in both the research and development realms—as well as in sustainability, as more and more customers are coming to Shimadzu seeking to meet regulatory thresholds with greener products.

"We test the compounds and additives, but it is not solely physical property testing—we also dig down into the compounding of the sample," Gabler said.

Within the rubber world, Shimadzu can screen raw materials and conduct analysis of oil lubricants for quality assurance or quality control, looking for restricted (at least in the U.S) contaminants.

"We do regulatory testing and assist our customers (in their sustainability efforts)," Gabler said. "For that reason we have to keep up with changing regulations. The analytical industry is essential to sustainability efforts—they are all trying to pivot in their manufacturing processes, trying to deliver a good or better product."

And while Shimadzu is very much interested in keeping its customers well-informed of environmentally unfriendly compounds via absorption and adsorption testing techniques, the company itself has employed green initiatives with its own instruments.

"Our instruments have built-in sleep modes to use less energy and power down automatically," Gabler said. "Also with how they operate, whether it is lower-energy consumption motors or making sure we use environmentally friendly materials with our gas chromatography machines, there is method development as well."

Gabler, based at Shimadzu's North American headquarters in Columbia, Md., said the company has testing centers in six of seven continents and proprietary technologies with a number of its services and machines. Its machines are designed in Japan and manufactured around the world, mainly in Japan, Americas and Asia.

"We have to be where our customers are," Gabler said. "We are a global company overall with subsidiaries for each area."

Gabler said that since Shimadzu traditionally ships its testing machines by air freight, the company has not experienced many of the supply line issues—from inflation to freighters sitting off the coast of ports for extraordinarily long times—afflicting rail and sea shipments.

Besides its universal mechanical testing machines, Shimadzu boasts a thermal product line for differential scanning calorimetry, a thermo-analytical technique in which the difference in the amount of heat required to increase the temperature of a sample and reference is measured as a function of temperature.

Its instruments in the automotive and aerospace testing realms include X-ray inspection machines; leak inspection and detection technology, especially as it relates to helium and the airtightness of a product; dynamic balance testing for tires, alternator motors and starter motors; and film deposition technology, "which ensures high-quality film properties and offers among the highest throughput rates available in the industry for automating operations in line with injection molding machines."

Film deposition can be remarkably important, according to Shimadzu, as the industry transitions from metal alloys to plastics for automotive parts.

The technology features high-throughput and is characteristic of high-adhesion, high-coverage on three-dimensional parts. These film deposition instruments have unique applications in heads up displays, headlamp reflectors, EMI shielding and other optical parts.

Finally, within automotive, is Shimdazu's proprietary vacuum heat treatment technology, via vacuum furnaces, to meet the non-oxide ceramic needs during sintering applications.

This can help improve maintainability during mass production and represents the ultimate destruction of a sample or part, as the temperature is raised in a particular furnace until the part is totally destroyed. Shimadzu then can report back to the customer about the thermogravimetric analysis, or how the mass of a sample is measured over time against temperature changes.

Like so many other companies, the pandemic hit Shimadzu from an operational standpoint, in the sense that the company restricted travel, had to adhere to different regulations in different countries and had to adapt to a digital world with online meetings.

"People could not go on-site, buying physical hardware at a given location—and we had to figure out how to adapt to that," Gabler said. "We had to make as much digital as we could. We became very well-versed in remote training, guiding and teaching people how to install an instrument themselves.

"Now we have kind of gone back to normal, but we have kept the things that work, like the perfection of the digital side when we could not be in-person. Things are still opening up, and like here at the IEC, people are getting back together. People are looking for an opportunity to get in front of customers and suppliers, one-on-one. This conference allows those who maybe have not heard of you to get a chance to talk face-to-face and see their products."