Innovation

Innovation

5 benefits of pressure-controlled liquid handling

There are different systems available for liquid handling in laboratory automation. Festo favors pressure-controlled dosing systems for liquids because they offer a wide range of impressive benefits.

Innovation

Easy integration of piezo valves

Extremely energy-saving, silent and without any heat build-up – piezo technology offers many benefits for efficient and precise gas handling in medical technology and laboratory automation. The biggest difference between piezo valves and proportional solenoid valves is the energy consumption, which is up to 95% lower. Up to now, it has not been possible to simply replace proportional solenoid valves since piezo technology needs voltages of up to 310 V and thus specific electronics. Now, however, there are simple solutions for this, which we will be presenting in this article.

Innovation

Design for Manufacturing of lab-on-a-chip devices

Mobile in vitro diagnostics is a growing market. Demand for fast and reliable point-of-care tests is steadily increasing. With Festo as a partner, scientists, universities, start-ups, and even established manufacturers can reduce the time-to-market for their lab-on-a-chip systems and get started with mass production straight away. This is made possible through collaborative engineering and a modular system of ready-to-install, pretested subsystems.

Innovation

Saving lives with the right antibiotic

Until now, it would typically take two to four days for clinicians to find out the best, most effective antibiotic to prescribe to patients with an infection. A new diagnostic platform finds the right drug, for targeted therapy within 24 hours. Included: dosing heads and handling portals from Festo.

Innovation

Integrated solutions for liquid handling

One of the main topics in laboratory automation is handling extremely small quantities of liquids, from milliliters to nanoliters. That is why Festo offers compact and perfectly integrated functional units. These standardized components enable system and equipment manufacturers to shorten their development times and, at the same time, meet strict quality requirements reliably and efficiently. This makes Festo not just a valuable partner for customers in the healthcare sector, but also in other industry segments in which accurate liquid handling is required, such as food and cosmetics production, printing and cleaning, as well as breeding and incubation processes.

Innovation

Teaching robot for dentists

No one enjoys going to the dentist; young children even less so. To help future dentists and dental assistants deal with children during dental treatments, the Japanese company tmsuk has developed a humanoid robot that realistically simulates the behavior of young children during these treatments, complete with fidgeting, flinching or closing the mouth. The dummy’s realistic movements are produced using proportional pressure regulators with piezo technology.

Innovation

On the hunt for high throughput diagnostics

Global diagnostics companies and laboratories are in a race against time to adapt testing capacities to current demand. Due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for testing exceeds the existing capacity by far.

Innovation

Ideal for developers: Liquid Handling Starter Kit

Pressure-controlled dispensing systems are used wherever precision, throughput and reliability are required. Festo offers developers in laboratory automation a starter kit for dispensing liquids that simplifies and speeds up the initial setup of a new dispensing application.

Innovation

Repetition accuracy in liquid handling

The need for an external air supply means that space is limited when installing liquid handling systems. Also, the multiple dosing of liquids places very high demands on repetition accuracy. Festo has found solutions to both challenges, which are described in more detail in this article.

Innovation

Accurate removal of prostate tissue

Medical robots are playing an increasingly important role in medical diagnostics. Partially automated handling solutions allow the precise targeting of suspicious areas in the prostate, delivering more accurate biopsy results and better prostate cancer detection.

Innovation

The road to Le Mans

When racing, drivers usually use their arms and legs constantly to operate the accelerator, gears, clutch and brakes. The newly developed pneumatic control system from Team BRIT and MME Motorsport means that all of the team’s racing drivers can now compete in races using the same car, regardless of their physical limitations. Spurred on by this innovation, the drivers have now set themselves an ambitious goal: the Le Mans endurance race.

Innovation

Faster development of specimen handling

Festo USA, in collaboration with PerkinElmer, developed a compact specimen handling solution for a global leader in manufacturing medical devices. Thanks to the involvement of the customer early on in the development process, the subsystem is easy to integrate into the customer’s platform – with Festo standard components, a PerkinElmer® JANUS G3 workstation, and a modified rotary gripper module. This approach resulted in minimal complexity with maximum productivity and process reliability.

Innovation

Mixing & dosing gases – 4 applications, 1 solution

Precisely mixing and dosing gases plays a decisive role in many areas, whether in life sciences, machine building or food & packaging. The proportional flow control valve VEMD is the cost-effective solution provided by Festo for a wide range of applications. Let's take a look at four examples.

Innovation

Collaboration in laboratory automation

The Dutch company Synchron Lab Automation developed an automated DNA extraction system with very high throughput rates by working very closely together with Festo. As a result, customers in the seed industry can collect DNA from up to 40,000 samples per day.

Innovation

Automated opening and closing of sample vials

The handling of sample vials – in particular opening and closing – is a special challenge in the field of laboratory automation. The goal is to unite high levels of process reliability with minimal complexity. You’ll find out here which factors are important in finding the right solution.

Innovation

Precision and accuracy in liquid handling

A key process in lab automation is dispensing liquid aliquots, for example by means of automated liquid handlers. Evaluating liquid handling performance is important for lab technicians, as well as for manufacturers of liquid handling technology. The yardsticks for evaluating dispensing performance are precision and accuracy.

Innovation

Precision and accuracy in liquid handling

A key process in lab automation is dispensing liquid aliquots, for example with the help of automated liquid handlers. Evaluating liquid handling performance is important for lab technicians, as well as manufacturers of liquid handling technology.

Innovation

Contactless weighing

Ultra-clean and germ-free processes are becoming increasingly important for industrial production, particularly in the medical and pharmaceutical industry. Surfaces in cleanrooms must be sealed, easy to clean well and to disinfect properly. A new concept using superconductor technology now enables contactless and precise weighing and measuring.

Innovation

Through the eyes of the future

You wear glasses so you can see better. You wear augmented-reality glasses so you can see more. These new spectacles enhance the surroundings with computer-aided information. Technologies with augmented reality (AR) make it possible to look at everyday situations as well as the working world of the future in a different way.

Innovation

Electronics to wear

So-called wearables are in high demand, whether for smart watches, fitness wristbands or data glasses. In the private sphere, these devices offer many ways of acquiring data. For example, distances covered, sleep patterns or body temperature can be checked. The technology also creates potential for use in companies, especially with regard to optimizing processes.

Innovation

Fascinating interaction

Whether at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida or in the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, visitors like to converse with the humanoid robot RoboThespian. It approaches them directly and does so with movements that look quite natural. All this is made possible by the latest technology from Festo, such as the fluidic muscle and piezo valves. The 1.75-metre-tall humanoid weighing 33 kilograms was developed by Engineered Arts Limited in the English town of Penryn in Cornwall.

Innovation

The keeper of time

Joachim Ullrich is President of the PTB – Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig, Germany’s national metrology institute. The clocks that tick here are among the most accurate in the world. In this interview, the physicist explains how they work, what this has to do with Coordinated Universal Time and why it’s a good idea to define a second to sixteen decimal places.