The temperatures are sky high! All winter you’ve thought about going camping, traveling with your caravan, and planning precious family trips. Finally, it’s the time to leave everything behind and for a moment forget the busy life and struggles at home. However, everywhere you go, Bronkhorst is traveling with you. Bronkhorst plays a role in many more applications than you think, especially when you go camping. Let’s walk through some mainstream products you often see at a camping site, and the involvement of mass flow control.
When traveling to a vacation destination by car, you will constantly encounter some Bronkhorst solutions. Let’s start with the dashboard of your car. Many cars have a leather dashboard, or at least, it looks like leather. Companies manufacture “skin” that covers a car’s dashboard to give it a leather look. To produce the skin, a color polyurethane liquid sprays into a nickel mold. A Coriolis mass flow controller with a control valve forms the basis of this process, thus accurately supplying external release agent onto the nickel mold surface.
In addition, the foam within the dashboard uses Bronkhorst products for manufacturing. To create the foam, a gas mixes with acrylamide-butadiene-styrene (ABS) or polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to give it the right volume. Too much gas will make the foam unstable, but too little and you’ll get a heavy solid block. Therefore, it is important that the correct amount of gas mixes, which is where using an accurate gas flow controller is highly advantageous.
Next, look beyond your dashboard to see through the front window of your car. Thermal mass flow controllers can coat the windshield for a variety of purposes. For example, coatings help control the light transmittance of glass. They also make it water repellent and protect it from mechanical and chemical stress. Furthermore, coatings can help increase the scratch resistance and provide shatter protection. Individually controlling the process gas flows improves the batch consistency of film thickness and uniformity.
Polycarbonate widely replaced headlights glass in the early 1980s. But this causes new problems to arise since headlights are subject to harsh environments. Due to their position in the front of a car, critical parameters for lifetime and performance include resistance to weather, scratches, and also abrasion. To protect polycarbonate headlights from these factors, scratch and abrasion coatings are sprayed onto headlights, with the help of robots that use Coriolis mass flow controllers to control the flow of the spray nozzles.
However, surface treatment is not only applicable for hard materials like glass and dashboards. If you have experience with camping, you are familiar with how fierce the summer weather can be. The awning of your caravan needs to be water repellent – this also applies to your raincoat – to sustain the occasion of heavy rainfall. To make fabrics and textiles hydrophobic, Empa – a research institute of the ETH Domain, applies plasma polymerization to deposit thin, nanoscale layers on top of fabrics and fibers. For this application, a Controlled Evaporation and Mixing device, a new technology of Vapor Generation System, is useful in applying the nanoscale layers. You can read more about this process in our blog “Hydrophobic Coating Process for Textiles.”
Once arriving to the camp site, we continue to find Bronkhorst in our material surroundings. Here, many people will enjoy the comfort of gas for heating or for cooking on a stove. But gas also helps us to fire up the barbecue in no time at all, in comparison with the old-fashioned briquettes that are sometimes hard to ignite. When gas escapes from a pressurized cylinder, you’ll recognize this from its penetrating scent.
However, as stated in our blog “How mass flow controllers make our gas smell,” natural gas is inherenelty odorless. By using a mass flow controller to control the supply of odorants like Tetrahydrothiophene (THT) or an odorizing mercaptan, the odorant is mixed with natural gas for an important purpose – to save lives.
Let’s stay with the topic of scent for a moment. When we want to decrease the amount of mosquitoes in our surroundings, we often light a citronella candle. And with CORI-FILL dosing technology, Bronkhorst offers an easy-to-use setup to dose fragrances, like citronella, in candles. The addition of fragrance to a candle needs careful monitoring to ensure the candle burns cleanly and safely.
While a candle can bring light to your surroundings, you won’t take a candle with you when you dash to the camping toilets at night. Instead, you will use a flashlight, of course. The working principle of the LED (Light Emitting Diode) inside this flashlight is a technology where Bronkhorst flow instrumentation plays its part. Whether in a flashlight or an industrial LED in a parking lot, it works via a phenomenon called electroencephalogram. This phenomenon is an emission of light from a semiconductor (diode) under the influence of an electric field. By applying a semiconducting material like Gallium arsenide phosphide for instance, the manufacturing of red, orange, and yellow light emitting diodes is possible.
We’ve told you so much already, but frankly, it is just a small portion of all the camping applications our flow instrumentation is involved in. Hopefully you got some more insights on the importance of Bronkhorst in every day life and even when you go camping.
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