Cliché Slogans Designed To Keep a Conversation Alive

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Stereotyping Our Expressions

People always feel the need to say something when they greet people, so they usually say things like, “it’s a beautiful day”, “they’re calling for rain”, “it’s a bit cloudy” or some other reference to the weather. Let’s face it we all do it.   It seems that every time we watch the news or talk shows, they all say the same old clichés, but the one that seems to be getting most people’s attention and disdain is the over-used and abused, “At the end of the day”.

The Cliche Commonplace

There are more attractive ways to say the same thing, including “when all is said and done”, “the fact of the matter”, and “in the final analysis”.  A friend of mine from Carmel, Indiana was a big Pink Floyd fan who put together a compilation album of their hits and he had a clever title for the CD.  He called it “The Animals Wish You Were Here on the Dark Side of the Wall. It was his way of getting four separate albums under one creative name. If you know the group Pink Floyd, you already know the creative genius behind the band, but you will also recognize the creative liberty that my friend took in coming up with his title.

A Rose by Another Name

When it comes to being creative and trying not to be so cliché, coming up with names for newly developed products, can be as hard as trying to pick a name for a new baby.   Watch for new products from Static Clean in the coming weeks with names like Particle Trap® Mini, Tempest, and the APSC-5 Nozzle. Let’s face it, when all is said and done, at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that in the final analysis, you can always find something new at www.staticclean.com

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The converting machine were all running clickety clack

In the hopes that production would not be held back

When what to management’s unpleasant surprise,

The static was so bad, it impacted their lives.

The customers were mad, plant workers not fine

All in an effort to meet a tight deadline.

This was no ordinary printing request

It was the Christmas catalog that promoted its best.

In a desperate attempt, out comes the tinsel

Draped over machines, like dawn of a thistle.

The problem at hand, it wasn’t the cure

They needed something more potent that was for sure.

Jingle goes our phone in a desperate plea

Is there someone at Static Clean that can help me?

In times like this, passive won’t bring luck

You need a 4203 static bar, so please contact Chuck.

CHECK OUT OUR MODEL 4203 FOR THE TOUCH CONVERTING STATIC PROBLEMS

WWW.STATICCLEAN.COM  chuck@staticclean.com

Static Clean Logo

    Wishing you a very Happy Holidays from the Static Clean Family!!

 

A New Technology in Town

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The “DC Only” myth

Static Clean has been proud to represent Shishido Electrostatic Limited for over eight years as they continue to set the bar high when it comes to innovative ionization technology used in static control. For years, most high technology companies, especially those in Semiconductor and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) have viewed DC Ionization as the only acceptable type of static controls devices in their ESD Sensitive fabs and processing line. The “DC Only” myth was created almost 20 years ago and since that time it has been an uphill battle for AC corona ionization to be considered. That is about to change.

Achieving Balance

Shishido’s new technology is called HDC-AC, which is a Hybrid Digitally Controlled AC power supply design. One of the major problems with all ionizer products is that the emitters or needles gather particles on the tips. This contamination problem reduces ion output production, which translates to slower static decay rates and it also upsets the positive and negative balance of the ions being created. Simply stated, an unbalanced ionizer can produce more ions in one polarity than the other, which can cause harm to sensitive electronic devices. With the HDC-AC design, less particles are attracted to the emitters in the first place, thus creating long-term stability and performance.

What actually is HDC-AC?

It is a unique, ultra-small, stable AC-type high-voltage power supply that is under patent pending status. It has superior features that are created by using digital control for the input of the wire wound transformer.   By using digital Pulse Width Module (PWM), it allows for greater control of the high-voltage output. How is the new technology implemented into ionizer products? So far, it has been incorporated into the CABX linear static bar, BF-XMB slim and lightweight benchtop ionizing air blower, the BF-X2MB unit, the BF-X4MB wide coverage (400mm) blower and the even wider coverage model BF-6MB, and the BF-OHP-3B Overhead Ionizing air blower. For information on these key products, please visit Static Clean at www.staticclean.com

Guns and Nozzles

Posted on by Jim Patterson

I see my life in terms of music

Being a big music enthusiast, running jam sessions in the barn behind our house and working in the static business always has me thinking of cool names to call our jam band.   The band is made up of four people from our company, Static Clean International and other invited guests. Then it hit me, we will call our band “Guns and Nozzles”.

In our lineup of static control products, some of the key tools to deal with static electricity and particle contamination problems are ionizing air guns and ionizing air nozzles.

Simply stated, they use compressed air or nitrogen to blow off debris and the ionizing components inside of the units make sure that the particles are not reattached back onto the newly cleaned substrate. The latest edition to the ionizing air tools is the Zapp Plus, which features a controller, a sensor eye, a goose-neck for flexibility, a built-in piezoelectric transformer and a fault detector to warn of power supply problems.

Without deviation progress is not possible-Frank Zappa

The Zapp Plus has gained wide acceptance for use with our Particle Trap® 6000, a source capture systems that collects the particles once removed from optics, medical devices, thermoformed trays and any product that requires cleanliness. The Particle Trap® 6000 was developed with a guy named Frank and as corny as it sounds, we’ve thought about calling the product the Frank Zappa. Of course that was never really going to happen, but who can argue with genius of the real Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

Guns and nozzles

Product Spotlight – Automated Medical Cleaning System

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The Problem

You may wonder, how did the Automated Medical Cleaning come about?  A major medical device manufacturer was having a huge fall out and poor yields in it’s manufacturing that result in what are called tear downs in the industry. Basically, their process was to perform 100% visual inspection for Particulate Matter (PM) inside of a sealed tray that housed the medical devices they manufactured.  The device has a lid stock that is heat sealed into place. When they see a particle inside of the finished tray, they put that tray aside as a reject. At some point after the manufacturing, they tear open the rejected trays, which means lots of additional labor, discarding the package, re-cleaning the product and the new packaging materials and re-packaging the product.

The Solution

The aforementioned medical device customer of Static Clean, purchased one of our manual medical cleaning systems and ran 50,000 parts with zero tear downs. An operator now simply passes the trays under a pair of cleaning hoods that are integrated into one of our work stations. It proved so successful that they ended up ordering a dozen of our manual medical cleaning systems. To further enhance the efficiency, the throughput, and to take any human error out of the equation a customer asked if we could provide an automated system that transported their trays and products through the cleaning zone.  After some work with our Engineering teams, we created the automated medical cleaning system.  Now the Automated Medical Cleaning System is gaining wide acceptance in the Medical Device manufacturing community.

 

Static Clean International’s (SCI) Medical Cleaning System with Automated Shuttle (MCS-AS) provides all the benefits of the MCS system – an effective, efficient, time-proven system for cleaning products / packaging, source capturing particulates in critical medical device manufacturing and packaging processes – and elevates it to a whole new level.

SCI’s Medical Device Manufacturer and Packaging customers, many you rely on for health care products, have enjoyed over a decade of reduced tear-down, better quality, higher yields and profits using our MCS system.  Previously only available in a manual-feed system, SCI proudly introduces our new MCS-AS with automated shuttle for complete control over the cleaning process for optimal, repeatable results.  By incorporating a speed-adjustable pneumatic or servo-electric slide with stainless steel nest, custom fit to your packaging-trays, your operator simply places a tray, loaded with your product, into the nest, touching the Opto-Touch button to begin the cleaning cycle.  The MCS-AS shuttles the nest at a controlled speed through the cleaning zone where static bars and stainless steel air tubes provide compressed, ionized air to neutralize static charges on the trays/parts, stripping particulates off surfaces, nooks & crannies.

Once airborne, particles in the cleaning zone are captured via the Medical Cleaning System – Automated Shuttle (MCS-AS) dust collector which draws a powerful vacuum, high velocity air from the cleaning zone, conveying the contaminants into the vacuum slot of the stainless steel hoods.  The particles are captured in the dust collector’s internal filtration, gently delivering clean air back into the clean room through a HEPA filtered exhaust.

Integral safety features E-stop the system if an obstruction is encountered, exerting more than 3~5 lbs. of force along the shuttles path, easily reset with the push of a button once the obstruction is cleared.  Power to the static bars and compressed air to the air tubes at the cleaning hoods are controlled by the systems PLC, turning on only during a cleaning cycle, significantly reducing energy costs.

An anodized aluminum profile frame provides a sturdy foundation for the system, supporting the dust collector and all components in a sleek, clean package.  Locking swivel casters, a quick-connect compressed air fitting and a standard 120V plug make moving the MCS-AS easy within your facility.

We are Limited by Your Imagination!

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Intelligence and Imagination

Albert Einstein once said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination” and an unknown author said, “Anyone who thinks the sky is the limit, has limited imagination. It seems like they were both “wicked smart”. A twist to being limited by one’s own imagination is being limited by someone else’s imagination. If a person can visualize something that seems impossible, there will most likely be someone who can actually make it a reality.  There are times when I mix up the two words innovation and invention. Innovation refers to the use of a better device, idea or a new process, while invention is the creation of the method or the product itself.

Static Clean’s new Model TSN75E is an example of an innovation that became an invention, which is now Intellectual Property (IP).   It is a high voltage line frequency 50/60 Hz transformer based AC Power Supply, with a special Resistive Output Coupler that provides optimal TSN75e-power-supplyvoltage limiting and load regulation, thus enhancing the reliability of the Static Neutralizing System.

Static Bars and Power Supplies

The number of static bars that can operate on a single power supply is dictated by the length of the static bars, the length of the high voltage cable and the construction of the high voltage cable. (Shielded or non-shielded).   The load is calculated in Pico farads (pF).   Customer kept asking us, can I add one more static bar to my existing power supply, so we created a matrix chart based on the new TSN75E that makes it easier for our customers to make the right choice.  To learn more send an email to techsales@staticclean.com or visit our website for a Live Chat, depending on the time of day.   With that said, have a good day dream and keep using that imagination.

Quantum Theory and Many Are Leery

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Quantum Theory

Quantum physics or in reality, quantum mechanics provides a mathematical description of the dual, particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter.    The mathematical formulas of quantum mechanics are abstract and therefore were hard for most people to comprehend because they required an understanding of complex numbers and linear functions. In 1900 the atomic hypothesis was widely understood, but not universally accepted.   These waveforms were considered to be like acoustic resonance. From Wikipedia, the term acoustic resonance is sometimes used to narrow mechanical resonance to the frequency range of human hearing. However, many times the frequency is outside the range of human hearing. You could see what creative means had to be adopted to understand the unknown or unheard.

Grounding Electricity

Everyone understand that most things electrical should be always at ground potential. There are Electrical Codes and the NFPA writes the book on proper grounding.   We make sure our buildings, electrical equipment and appliances are all grounded and ionizers use a ground reference to create positive and negative ions. Sometimes we drive copper rods into the earth to seek proper grounding. One of the first things we look for in malfunctions in equipment is a ground fault. We think in terms of keeping things at “zero”. In the quantum mechanics model it works on a non-zero state, and instead of traditional static it allows for far more dynamic possibilities. Thinking totally outside of the box!!

Young Einstein

In 1905 Albert Einstein, at the age of 26, postulated that the energy of a beam of light is quantized and just a year later he used quantization ideas to study the heat/temperature puzzle of various gases. In 1911 quantization was used to experiments to understand position and speed albert-einsteinand in 1913 quantum mechanics/physics were introduced to gain understanding of the hydrogen atom. This scientific development lost some of its traction with the start of the First World War in 1914.   After the war, quantum mechanics expanded rapidly. We didn’t evolve to understand quantum physics, but the search made it more exciting, but not everyone was excited and quantum mechanics has its main detractors.   Although it has been a century since we established how quantum mechanics “works”, according to cosmologist Sean Carroll, we still don’t know what it really means. He went on to say that it might even be the most embarrassing subject in all of modern physics.

Some of us grew up in an era of Star Trek and the Starship Enterprise that was able to hit Warp Speed and others watched the TV show Quantum Leap, while others watch Carl Sagan in the Science hit Cosmos. Sagan said that at the heart of science, there are two distinguishing features which is uniquely valuable at the foundation of a workable world view. One of these is the self-correcting mechanism that not only allows for, but encourages, an unrelenting process of testing proposition in terms of their workability and falsifiability. The other is an essential balance between two attitudes: “an openness to new ideas, no matter how counter-intuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

Static Clean is proud to have an engineering team that pushes the boundaries of product development, but always with an eye towards verification and certification. “May the Force be with you”.

I’ll Take Passion over Pragmatism Every Time

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The definition of pragmatism is a practical, matter-of-fact way of approaching or assessing situations or of solving problems.  Quite a bit has been written on the question of “Passion vs. Pragmatism” and which is the correct path towards being successful. It has been said that Francois Mitterrand, the former president of France used pragmatism as his passion and that he only used tactics throughout the course of his presidency, to the dismay and frustration of his friends and enemies. However, his 14 years in office made him the longest serving president in the history or France.

In life if you are in the process of starting a business or challenged with leading and growing a business, it seems that those who are successful support passion, but have to be pragmatic at the same time. I would argue that passion has to be the dominant gene. Passion brings vision and from that vision grows ideas, which become a finished product or service. Obviously, unchecked passion can put a person or a company at risk. It happens when the “sales team”, gets excited by a customer’s product suggestion and they want engineering to tool up to develop and manufacture based on their excitement. It is also like have the same person who is responsible for product engineering be the quality control manager as well. Under that scenario there may be a tendency to let shoddy work or mistakes get out the door.

Passion is an intense emotion and it has been used to strengthen a word or a phrase. Examples of this are passion fruit, passion food, passion play, and passionate love affair. There is little doubt that when passion is used as an adjective, we get a clear vision of its meaning, which is why we should always follow our passion. When kids are young, they have wild ideas on what they want to be when they grow up. As parents, we cringe and know that our kids will eventually come back to reality. In fact, most parents tamper their children’s passion and crush their enthusiasm. I am “Guilty as Charged”, especially when my oldest daughter wanted to move to Hollywood to become an actress. It’s that innate sense of guiding our loved ones that drives our passion to protect. This story happens to have a happy ending, because our daughter came to work at Static Clean International, our own family owned business. As a customer service ambassador, she shares the same passion that drives our static eliminator brand loyalty into an increased presence in the global economy.

What does the Lone Ranger, the Lone Star State and the Lone Wolf Have in common?

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Texas Rangers

Manuel Gonzaullas was born in 1891 in Cádiz, Spain to a Spanish father and a Canadian mother who became naturalized US citizens and decided to settle in Texas. When Manuel was 15 years old he witnessed his only two brothers murdered and his parents wounded when bandits attacked their homestead.   Fourteen years later he became a Texas Ranger. He was one of the most respected peace officers in Texas, which is also known as the Lone Star State. In the 1930’s, the discovery of the Texas Oil Fields create many lawless towns including Pecos and Kilgore. Manuel was often sent alone to tame these lawless towns.   He became known as “El Lobo Solo” or in English, the Lone Wolf.   When news spread about oil being discovered, Kilgore’s population exploded from 700 to over 10,000 residents in just two weeks.

The Lone Ranger was created

Maybe in part due to the popularity of Texas Rangers and the Lone Wolf, a radio show about a fictional character called the Lone Ranger first The Lone Rangeraired in 1933 and it went on to be an enduring icon of American culture. The masked man and his faithful sidekick Tonto rode to right injustice and they operated on a strict moral code. The radio show morphed into a long running television series that lasted until 1957 and was actually ABC’s first bit hit.   In 1983 a new television show called Lone Wolf McQuade made its debut and it was about a renegade Texas Ranger who didn’t necessarily follow the rules as he battled drug kingpins with automatic weapons.   It was a long way from the days of the “Old West”.

Plastics rely on Texas Oil

Today Texas is still known for its oil industry. In February it hit a 34 year high with production at 2.9 million barrels per day and Texas at times has been the second biggest oil producer in the world behind OPEC. Texans can’t refine the oil as fast as it is coming out of the ground.   Many industries flocked to Texas to be close to the oil. The plastic industry depends on oil in the manufacturing of all things plastic.   Many of the plastic bags that you see in grocery stores and department stores come out of factories in Texas.  Many industries flocked to Texas to be close to the oil. The plastic industry depends on oil in the manufacturing of all things plastic.   Many of these factories require static eliminators and static generators to keep the plastic from sticking or jamming in the process and Static Clean provides the static bars and static generators are vital to keeping static under control and machines moving.

The Texas Rangers are still in operation with 150 officers that handle unsolved crimes, public corruption and border security operations. In honor of the Texas Rangers their national baseball team shares the same name. In 1930, the population of Texas was 5,824,715 and today it is more than 26,500,000 residents. You have to wonder if the Texas Ranger known as Lone Wolf ever thought that the Lone Star State would explode as it did to become one of the strongest economies in the United States and the world.

The World Unites in Support of Danny Nickerson

Posted on by Jim Patterson

July 25, 2014 marks the date of 6-year-old Danny Nickerson, of Foxboro Massachusetts’, birthday. Danny is a 6-year old with an inoperable brain tumor. His only wish this year was to receive birthday cards on his special day. The Huffington Post wrote an article about Danny & it went viral. Random people, strangers actually, have displayed ‘random’ acts of kindness towards Danny and his wishes. How? They sent him snail mail. Each and every day Danny would go to the PO Box that his parents set up for him & was astonished by the overwhelming flood of mail & love received by complete strangers from all over the world; California, Alaska, Australia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Norway & Sweden to name a few. Static Clean International, Inc. of Burlington, MA was one of those strangers. Danny has received over 15,000 snail mail birthday cards and still counting.

Word reached Patriots owner, Bob Kraft and he invited Danny and his family to the Patriots training camp this past Friday.  The team had a few surprises up their sleeves including all getting together at midfield to sing Danny happy birthday and present him with a very large birthday card signed by all the players.  Danny who is quite shy, sat there grinning from ear to ear as the Pats sang “Happy Birthday”.  It was a truly special moment for him and his family.

You’re probably wondering what snail mail for Danny and static have in common, right? Have you ever opened snail mail or an envelope or pulled sticky tape off of a surface and seen a flash of light? There is a name for this – triboluminescence; or in other words – a piezoelectric effect. When piezoelectric materials, like sticky or self-adhesive envelopes, are stretched – they generate electricity. When you rip an envelope open – the distribution of positive and negative charges across the envelope may become uneven. When the charges clump in one area – and are either highly positive or highly negative – and you continue to rip open the envelope, the electricity ignites the atoms in the glue & the energy created is released as light.

Not many people would try and solve a static on snail mail problem. However, if you were trying to control the piezoelectric effect from occurring – you may considering our Piezonizer ZAPP II nozzle. It’s a compact AC ionizer with an ultra-small built-in piezoelectric transformer. The excellent ion balance and fast static decay rates make this the ideal choice nozzle to reduce static elimination when space is at a premium.

Sources: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=894.0

Written by: Julianne Patterson – julianne@staticclean.com