Projects | azoulaye

Past, present and prospective projects

In order to get a good impression of our abilities we will disclose a number of projects we have either worked on, or are still finalizing at the moment of writing.

Finished projects

Heating element redesign:

Within this project a manufacturer of semiconductor lithography equipment had an issue with accelerated corrosion as a result of Sn vapor tackling the brazing alloy (BNi-2) of a number of their heating elements. This corrosion eventual reached the heating wires causing the entire heater to fail within just a few months.

It was therefore decided to redesign the heaters in such a way that the heater wires and the BNi-2 alloy were completely encapsulated by a layer of 316L stainless steel, sufficient enough to guarantee a lifetime of 7 years in the field. The assignment also included the fact that the new design needs to fit within the existing volume occupied by the old design.

Together with a number of other demands regarding the manufacturability of the new design, we came up with the following:

One is able to see the red component which is now acting as a shield against the Sn corrosion of the BNi-2 and heater wires. This redesign took a total of 4 months, in where the majority of the time was spent discussing all of the different demand with the stakeholders of the projects (customer, manufacturer, installers, etc.).

Gravity Compensating Arm Support:

For a manufacturer of medical arm supports AMDO has redesigned an emergency brake which locks the vertical rotation of the arm support.

The challenges with this design were had mainly to do with generating the large forces which are necessary for the braking action while maintaining the compact form factor of the brake itself.

Flame sensor adapter redesign:

Back at the Shell Pernis refinery there suddenly used to be a large number of trips (emergency shutdowns) of certain furnaces. These trips came out of nowhere and were also significantly impacting the refinery's revenue projections due to a loss of refining capacity.

As a result the company's founder was brought on site in order to investigate the cause of the trips and find a solution for them. During the period on site a number of different angles were investigated and we came to the conclusion that the gravel which came loose from the furnace walls in combination with the dated design of the flame sensor adapter were the prime culprits of the false trip signals.

The schematic above describes the original design of the flame sensor adapter, after some time we came up with the following concept:

As you can see there are a number of differences compared to the old design, as shown by the angled transparent cover and increased orifice size. But this new closed design also brought a number of other problems with it which needed to be solved, such as the fact that the thermal radiation has the ability to heat up the vision sensor to temperatures beyond 70° Celsius.

This was solved by making increased use of the colder high velocity cleaning air in order to keep the heat transfer between the internals of the adapter and the outside world optimized. This resulted in the following finalized design:

After a period of six months the total number of trips at the designated furnaces were reduced by over 80%.

Heat shield removal tool test bench:

The same client which requested the redesign of the heater mentioned previously also had a problem with some of the other component getting stuck due to excessive tin buildup within the source vessels. As a result a tool was developed in order to remove the heat shield in question, the problem consisted of the fact that the heat shield is located in a very tight space with sensitive equipment all around which could potentially be damaged due to the large forces generated by the new tool.

As a result AMDO managed to develop a small scale test bench which could not only measure the force generated by the tool, but it could also test out the fitting of the tool within the source vessel wall by simulating that exact geometry.