Orange Juice. Laughing gas. The Saturn and Jupiter orbiters. Mayonnaise.
All of these important things share a common trait: They’re made with unusual devices created at Mott Corp. in the Farmington Industrial Park.
Mott is the world’s largest maker of porous metal products. Or, at least, “the largest we know of,” said CEO Roger Klene.
Basically, these are metals that have been manipulated in such a way that they can be used to either filter a material – typically, a gas – or allow it to pass through at a particular rate.
There are many uses for these kinds of things. Most mayonnaise-makers, for instance, use a special filter made by Mott to shoot nitrogen into their product, which pulls out oxygen. Without doing so, mayonnaise would go bad quickly on grocery store shelves. Huge ranges of food-makers use similar Mott devices to create products from orange juice to potato chips.
They’re even in space. The jet propulsion units used on the Saturn and Jupiter orbiters were built using Mott products to filter the gases ejected by the satellites as they try to right maneuver themselves through orbit. It’s a similar principal used on the laughing gas machines in dentists’ office, many of which use Mott-manufactured filter pieces.
In case you were wondering, the proper term for what Mott does is to “sinter,” which comes from the German word, “sinter.” It means to mold without melting.
It’s not the only nifty, space-age thing in the Farmington Industrial Park with roots in Germany.
Right down the street, as you walk in the door to Trumpf Inc., you know right away that you’re in for a show. At the front desk, a receptionist uses a laser to blast the name and organization of a visitor onto a thin strip of sheet metal used as a name badge. It takes only seconds.
Inside, the lasering gets scarier. In the company’s main display area, a room-sized laser blasts elaborate, small widgets out of quarter-inch steel, sending sparks flying in all directions. On another side of the room, a robot picks up sheet metal and lays it on a punching machine, which can carve, cut, tap or manipulate metal in any number of ways.
Trumpf — a subsidiary of Ditzingen, Germany-based Trumpf Group, a private entity — makes the machines that make a whole lot of things. If you’ve been to Dolphin Stadium in Miami for a football game, you’ve probably looked up at one of the electronic scoreboards. Well, the metal frames used inside of them were built by Daktronics using Trumpf machines.
And if you watched a player get hurt on the field, then you probably watched them taken off of the field on the back of a cart, which was probably made by Taylor-Dunn. That company uses Trumpf machines to build the controls for those carts, known as burden carriers.
But a sizable range of manufacturers use Trumpf laser cutting machines and punching machines. Spend enough time around manufacturing and you’ll probably see one.
You could start by going right across the street from Trumpf to EBM Papst, which is a major manufacturer of air moving products like fans for computers and HVAC systems. You’ll find at least a dozen lasers inside.
Kenneth J. St. Onge is associate editor of the Hartford Business Journal.
