Eurofins Scientific is the world leader in food, environment, pharmaceutical and cosmetic product testing, discovery pharmacology, forensics, advanced material sciences, and in agroscience Contract Research services. It is also one of the global independent market leaders in genomics and in the support of clinical studies, as well as in BioPharma Contract Development and Manufacturing.

Project Description

Eurofins conducts exposure testing using small metal enclosures lined with filter paper, as you can see above. As is often the case with our clients, off-the-shelf solutions are not available for niche applications like this one. In discussing the project with our client, we learned that they were cutting sheets of filter paper BY HAND every time they needed to run a series of experiments and that cutting enough filters could take a few days of labor. This was both time-consuming and expensive.

What We Did

This was a straightforward application of micro-manufacturing for us. Eurofins provided an example sheet with the dimensions. We took the example provided and converted it into a lightweight CAD model. We then laid it out in an optimized pattern to maximize the yield per sheet. Finally, we set it up as a laser cutting job, and after some tweaking, we were able to produce small runs of about 1,000 pieces per hour. So, in a few hours we were able to produce an entire years’ worth of custom-cut filters.

We covered each of the following domains:

• Micro-Manufacturing
• Rapid Prototyping
• CAD Support