Hamilton Company Tackles The Challenge Of Conductivity With New Sensor Technology

At INTERPHEX 2012, John Rouen discusses the challenge of conductivity – primarily to provide a stable measurement. It’s important that the customer provides clean water to their products.  In order to do that, they have to keep a lot of the unwanted materials out and it is difficult to measure at very low levels.

Hi, I’m Lori Clapper, editor with Bioprocess Online at INTERPHEX 2012. I’m with John Rouen from Hamilton Company. John, thank you so much for joining me today.

I’m glad to, you’re very welcome. Thanks for having us.

Sure. Something I’d like to address is the challenges that your end users face regarding conductivity. Could you discuss that a little bit?

Conductivity is a relatively straightforward measurement, but it has its challenges. Chief among them is to provide a stable measurement. In this world of pharmaceutical products and sanitary products, it’s important that the customer provide a very clean water to most of their product.

Clean water is important. In order to that, they have to keep a lot of the materials that are unwanted in there, a lot of the ions, a lot of the salts and so forth that are commonly found in water. They have to keep those out of there, and it’s very difficult to measure very, very low levels. You can measure high levels, but you can’t measure low levels very easily.

What makes your technology unique in helping with that?

Our technology has transformed the industry from using what is called a process loop, a measurement loop, which includes a sensor cable and the transmitter to allow a customer to eliminate that transmitter, eliminate that cost, eliminate problems with the signals that they often see being communicated between the sensor and the transmitter.

We put that into one product. Now we have not only the sensor itself, the element that senses conductivity, but we have the transmitter that was formerly a separate item, and we’ve eliminated that connection between the transmitter and the sensor by putting it in internally.

Now, out of the back end of the sensor, we can provide a robust, easy to handle signal that can be sent to their control system.

What applications can this be used for?

As I said, it’s used anywhere where water is used. The pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, many industries require that they have very clean water and they can tell the water’s clean without a lot of stuff in it by measuring conductivity.

If they can determine how much electrical current that water will conduct, the lower amount that it can conduct, the cleaner the water, the less stuff that’s in it. Here we have a product line that can provide that customer with the communication they need to their control system.