The medical research and pharmaceutical sector has been a particular growth area for Novatech in recent years.

With over 20 well known customers in this sector, Novatech regularly produce sensors for applications including:

• Dosing
• Pill pressing
• Female health
• Sterile packaging in carefully controlled environments
• Testing of organic tissue samples
• Analysing the strength of muscles and muscle fibres
• Force feedback control of medical tools / equipment

Where sensors are to be incorporated into equipment for medical applications, it is important that the final assembly is easy to clean. Medical tools will need to be sterilised thoroughly on a regular basis and our loadcells offer a perfect fit. We can ensure a sterile stainless steel construction that can withstand exposure to the high pressure steam environment of medical grade autoclaves. In general, our engineers can design custom variants of most standard products, or completely bespoke items, which will provide the necessary robustness for use in demanding environments without unduly sacrificing performance. This is particularly important in medical research and pharmaceutical applications as these often involve the measurement of very small forces to an extremely high precision.

Loadcells are often used in dosing applications and pill presses to create tablets for medicinal use. Typically the active ingredient is measured in milligram levels of magnitude. To accurately measure 1mg you would need to be able to resolve to 0.1mg to exclude any rounding error. This is roughly equivalent to one micro-Newton. To achieve this kind of resolution requires a loadcell with good mechanical, electrical and thermal stability as well as a suitable display or signal conditioner with a highly stable supply voltage. With the sheer number of pills being dosed and pressed per day, these machines need to work as fast as possible. As such, a popular combination for this and other medical research applications is the F329 loadcell with the DSCUSB. This allows measurements in the magnitude of micro-Newtons at a sampling frequency up to 100Hz.

If you have an application in the medical research or pharmaceutical sector it is highly likely that Novatech have already engineered a solution to your requirement. Contact one of our engineers to discuss your force measurement needs.