Martin Mincevich

The Need for Greater Automation

In their efforts to develop new analytical instruments, product development engineers' challenges revolve around addressing two major industry trends: 1) The need for higher throughput and 2) Ease of use for lower skilled labor. Both of these market requirements translate into the need for greater automation in analytical instrumentation.

The need for higher throughput is driven by such industries as pharmaceutical and biotech, which are constantly looking for ways to accelerate the drug discovery process, analyze tremendous amounts of information, and reduce cost per analysis. In order for analytical instruments to produce higher throughput, they must become more automated, eliminating time consuming manual steps.

In addition to the market requiring instruments to analyze samples in a shorter amount of time, the industry also requires easier to use instruments, so that lower skilled labor can be employed to perform analysis. Easier to use instruments reduce the labor cost of analysis and also allow higher skilled labor to focus on higher level tasks. Again, in order to make instruments easier to use, automation must increase.

These two market requirements transcend from the end customer in the lab to the instrument manufacturer down to the component manufacturer. In order to provide components that help product development engineers of analytical equipment meet these trends, ASCO Scientific has developed the Series 385, Manifold Mount Isolation Valve (Figure 1).

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