Many industrial and commercial processes are dependent on precise temperature control. This has long been the case in HVAC applications, where even relatively slight variation from ideal temperatures can lead to sweats or chills, not to mention unnecessary expense.
Heating can be critical in many processes, but when it’s not properly controlled the results can range from inconvenient to catastrophic. Things catch fire, plane wings ice up, and biological tests give wrong results. That’s why heating applications need controllers.
Each year, Minco awards a recognition trophy to individuals and teams recognizing their efforts making Minco successful and a great place to work. Each week the trophy recipient(s) sign the trophy and hands it off to another group or individual where the cycle of recognition repeats throughout the year.
It takes three things to start a fire: oxygen,
fuel, and ignition. Unless you’re in a controlled atmosphere, there’s always plenty of oxygen in the air around us. And in many industrial settings, fuel—flammable gas or liquid or finely divided flammable powders or fibers—is readily available in the products they make or use. Such operations go to great lengths to contain these dangerous fuels, but the critical factor that must be controlled is sources of ignition.
In our business, strong communications among engineers makes for better products and happy customers. This truism was demonstrated in a recent project we helped build for a defense-industry manufacturer: the control unit of a newly modified missile delivery system.
Problem: A major telecom customer needed to thermally stabilize a battery pack used in a high-altitude application. The pack was part of a payload kept in the stratosphere for weeks or even months at a time. The battery pack wouldn’t operate below freezing, and a heater was needed to maintain the pack at its optimal temperature range.
Building a flex circuit is a complex task. To make sure the project’s results match your expectations, it’s critical that the engineers working on your project understand your needs in detail. The package from which your circuit is built should consist of text and a variety of images showing multiple views and varying degrees of detail. Because the drawing for a flex circuit will be used both to estimate costs and to build the circuit, accuracy of this documentation matters a great deal.
Minco has been building sensors for over 60 years, and we have a reputation for providing solutions that are accurate and absolutely reliable. Often times these sensors are quite large, like the stator sticks that monitor the coil windings of a power station generator, sometimes reaching twenty feet in length.
As humans we’re kind of picky about temperature, so we use thermostats to control the heaters and air conditioners that maintain our relatively narrow comfort range. Similarly, many chemical, biological, electrical, and mechanical processes work best at specific temperatures and use sensors to help maintain those temperatures. In some applications, medical and aerospace in particular, maintaining a specific temperature is so critical to life and safety that redundant sensors are used to ensure reliability.
In most heating applications, the heating itself would be pointless without some kind of control. Typically, that process entails a controller and a sensor connected to the heater to create a feedback loop.
For more than 60 years, Minco has designed and manufactured heating, flex circuit, temperature sensing and instrumentation solutions for some of the world’s most demanding applications.
Thermal performance for standard and custom use cases — from environment stabilization to faster thermal cycling.
Accurately sense and measure temperature, humidity and fluid levels across a wide range of applications.
Achieve new design freedom with flex circuit solutions that improve reliability in a condensed package size.
System-matched controllers complement Minco sensors and heaters to deliver improved system accuracy.
