Optical Supplier Benefits From NASA Technology
NASA clean-room technology and the National Technology Transfer Center (NTTC) are helping a supplier to one of the world's largest optical companies explore new markets and products. CleenEzyTM Inc. is investigating a much larger market potential after taking over an optical lens cloth supply business and later discovering its product was based on a NASA technology.
Owners Mike and Tina Simpson had no idea what landed in their laps when they acquired the established optical lens cloth supply business as an addition to the cleaning supply business they manage. A multi-use technology, which for years has shielded space missions from devastating effects that the tiniest particles can make, produces scratch- and lint-free results in CleenEzyTM's lens wipes. A tiny speck of dust could trigger a malfunction in a sensitive spacecraft system, so NASA developed contamination control technology in the 1960s to prevent particle contamination during production and assembly of flight equipment in hospital-like "clean rooms." This technology has produced several offshoots, such as a line of contamination control garments used by hospitals, pharmaceutical and medical equipment manufacturers, aerospace and electronic plants, and other industrial facilities where extreme cleanliness is vital.
"We're working with CleenEzyTM in researching several new products by making prototypes that will be taken to mass production," Jack Williams of NTTC's Commercialization Center said.
CleenEzyTM's hypo-allergenic optical cloth is soft but durable enough to be effective on coated and uncoated surfaces, wet or dry, without streaking or smudging. It is reusable and disposable, making it more cost-effective than microweave cloths, and it has a four-micron porosity that entraps particles, preventing them from passing through or being released. In laboratories where lenses are manufactured, it significantly reduces the percentage of scratched lenses.
Research has found that the greatest sources of clean-room contamination are the people who work in such facilities. They can generate microscopic body particles that escape through tiny "windows" in the woven garments they wear.
CleenEzyTM, located in West Virginia's northern panhandle, services many of the country's top 25 optical companies and is the only supplier of lens wipes recommended by the Opticians Association of America.
For more information, contact Matt Moran at Lewis Research Center. Call (216) 433-8324, E-mail: mmoran@lerc.nasa.gov Or contact Jack Williams at NTTC. Call (800) 678-6882, E-mail: jwilliam@nttc.edu Please mention you read about it in Innovation.
Multiple market potential looks promising for a lens wiping cloth based on NASA's clean-room technology with the joint development efforts of the National Technology Transfer Center and Lewis Research Center.
