Peristaltic Pump Helps Customers See Clearly

A small manufacturing company in Malvern is making a success of producing innovative quality assurance equipment for the contact lens industry based on peristaltic pump technology from Watson-Marlow Bredel.

There cannot be many objects more awkward to measure than contact lenses - yet this is precisely the feat achieved regularly by hundreds of Optimec customers. Optimec equipment measures contact lens by suspending them in a saline solution, which provides enough surrounding strength for measurements to be collected. Light is shone through the solution/lens, and then through an optical projector system that generates a magnified image of the contact lens on a screen. This is the Optimec JCF model.

The problem faced by Optimec was that the light source raised the temperature of the saline solution, which in turn caused the dimensions of the contact lenses to drastically alter. The answer was to ensure that lenses were measured at a standard temperature, in this case 20 Degrees Celsius. In response to this need Optimec designed the TC20 model. The TC20 model was initially designed using an in-house manufactured diaphragm pump. This was found to be difficult to manufacture and set up. The solution was met admirably by choosing the 102R single channel peristaltic pumpheads from Watson-Marlow's OEM pump range.