Problem Solving & Innovation

With more than 35 years of experience in materials science and engineering, we are able to diagnose our clients’ problem and add value to the clients’ product performance and maximize profit. This is a cost-efficient approach to your problem solving and innovation that avoids the need for the client to hire a large number of PhD scientists and engineers to obtain the needed in-house creativity and problem solving skills.

Specifically, we solve materials selection, design, and development problems by providing:

• Breadth and depth of expertise in formulation-structure-processing-morphology-property-performance relationships for all classes of materials.
• Information, insights, and recommendations on the selection of materials for specific applications; based on our wealth of knowledge, experience, and electronic databases of product, processes, and market data like the Granta Design Cambridge Engineering Materials Selector^®.
• Access to commercial materials engineering design service providers to identify, develop, and produce special products with improved properties and low cost.
• Access to University- and industry-based laboratory testing facilities and expertise to measure materials structure, processing and performance properties through our university and industry partners.
• Other laboratories with specialized resources like government national laboratories can be used when needed through our collaborators in these laboratories.

Please contact us to discuss your material selection, design, and development needs. The first consultation session is provided free of charge.

Industrial Application Areas

• Chemicals and Petrochemicals
• Aircraft and Aerospace
• Automotive
• Paints and thin films
• Computers and wearable electronics
• Oil and Gas
• Nanotechnology
• Consumer plastic products
• Sports and Recreation
• Biomedical Materials Engineering
• Petroleum underground storage tanks (USTs) and flexible piping
• Academic

Flaney Associates Work Philosophy

Entrust Flaney Associates With Your Consulting Expert Needs. Put Our 35 Years of Plastics And Materials Science And Engineering Experience And Knowledge To Work For You!

Flaney Associates consultants market professional skills to solve clients’ problems. We use our technical expertise to provide technical advice to clients to make knowledge and data-driven decisions and perform tasks that are outside of (or complement) the client’s area of expertise in a cost-efficient timely manner. Because we realize that our excellent communication skills are just as important as our technical expertise, we provide our clients with dependable oral and written technical insights as follows:

Break Down Complex Concepts

This involves describing complex topics to people who may not have a background in those topics in a way that is useful to the layman. We strive to understand the backgrounds and knowledge of our clients to provide the most meaningful advice possible.

Understand Goals

We make recommendations about how companies can achieve goals and overcome problems. Our solid understanding of the objectives and problems clients face is essential for our clients to perform their jobs effectively. We form such an understanding through excellent writing and oral comprehension and the ability to ask questions to clarify points that are unclear. We also try to understand what resources clients have available to make recommendations that are financially feasible and reduce cost to maximize profit.

Avoid Miscommunication

It is our job responsibility to communicate our technical advice promptly and precisely to our clients to avoid confusion and misinterpretation of the advice that might lead our clients to make poor and costly business decisions.

Enhancing Environmental Sustainability

Flaney Associates helps clients to improve the environmental sustainability of their technologies by addressing the end of life aspects in the life cycle design of their products. We do so by doing the following:

• Increasing the percentage of ingredients obtained or derived from environmentally friendly feedstocks used in manufacturing commercial products.
• Reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing processes.
• Improving the methods utilized for the disposal of used products and of scraps from product manufacturing processes.
• Using materials science and engineering principles and modern life cycle design methods to address environmental sustainability challenges.

Expert Witness & Legal Services

Flaney Associates’ clients use our technical expertise in data acquisition, analysis, interpretation and presentation to help them navigate the complicated steps of protecting their intellectual property assets and to pursue the best course of action against those who infringe upon them. Our work often includes consulting on initial filings, prior art searches, patentability research, infringement and invalidity analyses, valuations, and even prosecution or defense of a client’s intellectual property before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We also perform infringement and invalidity analyses by working with clients to acquire or build custom test equipment tailored to the product under evaluation, providing difficult measurements, data-based evidence and insights that are important to an infringement analysis. Flaney Associates can facilitate complete investigations from inception to litigation related expert testimony.

Material Selection, Testing & Characterization

It is now widely recognized that material selection is often the most effective solution to addressing materials designing and processing challenges to gain an edge in innovating and creating new products. Flaney Associates provide cost-efficient, unique, and effective solutions using a number of tools that includes the Cambridge Engineering Selector^®, as well as, our more than 35 years of experience in materials science and engineering. We also have access to a network of university- and industry-based testing analysis partners that can provide materials testing data for a cost-efficient data-driven and value added decisions in a timely manner. This task is facilitated by the breadth and depth of our 35 years of experience in materials science and engineering.

Technical Project Management

One of Flaney Associates most valuable services is identifying university-based research groups, national government laboratories, and other resources that can be used by our clients to form cost-efficient productive university and industry partnerships to solve the industry clients’ problems. Our clients depend on our breadth and depth of multidisciplinary experience to solve their problems that are often at the boundaries between established disciplines or in areas combining many disciplines, providing our clients an edge in innovation and speed up time to market of products. We are also able to assist our clients to meet their in-house technical management needs by helping them form and manage cross-functional technical project teams with a focus on getting results.

Product R&D Strategy

To stay competitive, industries are continually engaged in product research and development activities to achieve an edge in innovation and speed up time to market of products while remaining focused on their own core competencies and strengths.

Flaney Associates can bring its breadth and depth of multidisciplinary science and engineering specialties to help clients with product development and product liability issues. We provide technical consulting and analysis related to product design, materials selection, technical and safety manuals, and on other competitive product labels to gain differential advantage of our clients’ products.

Flaney Associates offer world-class solutions that provide technology and market opportunity assessments, product ideation and concept shaping services, design, prototyping, testing, and production. We have experience in patents applications and assisting our clients in protecting their intellectual property.

Training

Flaney Associates assists clients in finding solutions for the clients’ unique projects by offering a number of on-site consultation services including cost-effective training and seminars customized to suit the clients’ needs. We help our clients to identify their needs and tailor the training to meet their specifications. The classes emphasize “ready to use” practical problem-solving techniques and use case studies to illustrate important practical aspects. With more than 35 years of multidisciplinary materials science and engineering experience, we can provide training across a wide range of topics including (but not limited to):

• Introduction to all classes of materials (plastics, metals, ceramics & glasses, composites, etc)
• Materials failure Mechanisms (e.g., Creep, Fatigue, Molecular Degradation, Impact)
• Approaches to material product failure investigations, correction and prevention
• Materials selection, design and development
• Materials Processing (e.g. extrusion and injection molding)
• Polymer science and engineering
• Composites materials design and applications
• Materials structure and property relationships.
• Rheology

Technical Adviser

Flaney Associates clients depend on our technology assessment services to help clients obtain commercial value from the current progress in science and technology as evidenced by the increasing growth of the scientific, patent, and trade journal literature.

Ideally, our clients request these services at an early stage of entry into a new technology area to get recommendations resulting from our comprehensive assessment, providing both high-level strategic guidance and road-map into the client’s exploration of the new technology.

 A technology assessment project involves the identification of what is important in large amounts of information, the development of reliable and strategic recommendations, and the oral and written presentation of the findings in a timely manner.

Technological Process Area

• Consumer materials science and engineering
• Materials processing
• Adhesives
• Compounding & Formulation
• Coatings and films
• Environmental sustainability issues
• Materials testing
• Properties of materials
• Research & development
• Extrusion & Injection molding
• Polymer reaction engineering

Materials Industrial Sector

• Engineering plastics
• Polyurethanes
• Polyamides
• Biodegradable plastics
• Polyesters/Polycarbonates
• Styrenics/related polymers
• Polyolefins/related polymers
• Thermosetting plastics
• FRP/GRP
• Carbon/aramid fibre composites
• Biomaterials
• Magnetic materials
• Nanomaterials/Nanocomposites
• Glasses and Ceramics