The Testing Times

Successful manufacturing relies on quality and productivity. Testing machines are  used to demonstrate the quality of raw materials such as steel alloys, composites, plastics and rubber as well as components including medical devices, packaging materials and fasteners. Manufacturing processes today are typically automated to a greater or lesser extent, although the quality process is often manual. This is generally time consuming, involving entering reference data, performing test  procedures, reporting on the results, preparing the testing machine, starting the test, qualifying and accepting the results and appending comments before removing the materials.  Historically, materials testing has been an operator using single or multiple stations. This can be uneconomical in terms of operator time where speed is  crucial – for example in testing threaded fasteners for the aerospace industry, testing is required 24 hours a day.  Drug delivery in the biomedical