Abstract
This month, we are featuring another progressive Companion Company Member,
It is now 32 years since Teus Bruggeman and Wybren Jouwsma set up Bronkhorst High-Tech BV in Ruurlo in The Netherlands manufacturing a range of Coriolis and Thermal mass flowmeters/controllers, electronic pressure controllers and Vapour Delivery Systems. The Bronkhorst Group now has over 300 employees at its headquarters, an impressive 50 of whom are engaged in research and development. The company offers the most extensive product range of Coriolis and Thermal mass flowmeters and controllers on the market, and through a network of subsidiary companies and closely associated distributors, these products are available in over 90 countries around the world.
In 1999, into this vibrant environment came a young sales manager, Andy Mangell. After graduating in geography and geology from the University of Exeter, he spent 6 years in the oil industry working on both exploration rigs and production facilities in Africa and the Middle East. When he returned to the United Kingdom in 1990, Andy was looking for a new challenge and so began a career in instrumentation sales. By 1999, he was an ambitious National Sales Manager for a product distributor but saw the potential offered by Bronkhorst and joined the ‘family’. Three years later that vision was fulfilled when Bronkhorst UK was set up in Cambridge with Andy as Managing Director. At that time, Bronkhorst UK had two employees but that has increased steadily to 17 handling an annual turnover of £6m. Bronkhorst UK became a InstMC Companion Company in September 2012.
So what is the reason for the company’s success? Well, obviously the product range is important. The company pioneered micro- to low-flow liquid and gas metering instruments based on the thermal principle, although this is, in truth, only part of the story. Today, Bronkhorst has the widest spread of Thermal and Coriolis mass flow instruments in the market with low measurement commencing as low as 0.013 mL/min and high flow culminating at 187,000 L/min, and all this within the capability of vacuum through to 700 bar. Perhaps more important, however, is the culmination of the constant research and development (R&D) and reinvestment into the product line with a multitude of features and benefits within the onboard software. Naturally, all printed circuit boards (PCBs) are now fully digital with user-accessible programming and reprogramming functionality. This enables such benefits as multi-gas, multi-range functionality, adaptable proportional–integral–derivative (PID) control, self-learning capability and batch control to name but a few. Furthermore, when in combination with the array of freeware diagnostic and control tools, the frontiers of mass flow control science really have been pushed to a higher level – ‘a Quantum Leap in Mass Flow Control’. These precision meters and controllers are in demand for a great many process critical applications, including health care, life science, university and research laboratories, analytical processes and semiconductor fabrication.
mini CORI-FLOW™ compact mass flow meter & controller
Bronkhorst UK has just introduced a new range of insertion thermal mass meters for pipe diameters up to 36 in, which will handle the demands of the biogas, industrial, oil and gas, water and waste and chemical sectors. Bronkhorst also offers pressure transducers and controllers with a minimum range within vacuum and a maximum range of 4000 bar.
Since 2001, the company has also developed Coriolis mass flowmeters, whereby a fluid, gas or liquid flowing through a vibrating tube causes changes to the frequency, phase or amplitude of the vibration, which is directly proportional to the mass flow and totally independent of fluid properties. The important factor with the Bronkhorst instrument is the incredibly stable zero point, enabling flow measurement as low as 0.1 g/h. The instrument also calculates the fluid density as a secondary measurement, and this, together with the temperature, can be given as an output. With higher flow rates extending into the thousands of kilograms per hour, they are ideally suited for dosing, batching and filling applications across such industries as pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, chemical and resin manufacture. As Andy puts it, ‘Nobody goes as low or as high in-line’.
However, products alone do not achieve growth. Customer satisfaction is high on the agenda, and the standard and bespoke products are the result of a close collaborative approach that has seen product development closely allied to both the needs and the wishes of customers.
New offices in Newmarket, Suffolk
Several things become clear talking to Andy – he is evangelical about flow measurement, he cares about Bronkhorst’s customers and he has a clear idea where his team is going. When asked about Bronkhorst’s target markets, he replies simply ‘Any industry that has pressurised gas or liquid flowing in a pipe’. That is reflected in the backgrounds of the six Area Sales Managers. Together they have more than a 100 years of experience in control and automation with specialist experience in applications ranging from pharmaceuticals and life science to materials and fluid power.
The company ethos is very much one of working closely with customers and that is a joint effort by the Sales Managers and the internal technical team headed up by Nathan Pearce. Nathan has a strong background in Manufacturing Excellence in lean, team-oriented environments and wants to see the company grow but in a controlled way. ‘We are small enough to treat each customer as an individual and we don’t want to lose that’, he says. ‘It means that we can share knowledge with our customers and work together’.
One way of sharing knowledge is the series of technical seminars and training sessions that Bronkhorst runs. Some of these are multiple customer seminars pulling together 30 or 40 customers to talk about metering problems. They provide an opportunity for networking and for that all important cross-fertilisation from one industry to another. However, Bronkhorst also runs customer-specific seminars ranging from lunch and learn to full-day programmes with theory and practical sessions.