Types of Projects Flaney Associates has Worked on!

• Expert Witness

As expert witness Prof. Otaigbe brings specialized knowledge, skills, and expertise in his chosen field.  He has been called upon to provide his professional opinion or testimony in legal proceedings.

It’s important to note that expert witnesses are expected to be impartial and objective in their testimony. They are not advocates for one side or the other but are there to provide their professional expertise to help the court arrive at a fair and informed decision. Prof. Otaigbe brings that level of objectivity to all his projects.

• Plant Production Problem Solving

Plant production problem solving refers to the process of identifying and resolving issues or challenges that arise within the manufacturing process.  This process ultimately solves and documents the challenges, the steps to resolve and final results.

• Productivity Improvement

Productivity improvement is a continuous process of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of an individual, team, or organization in order to produce more output or achieve better results with the same or fewer resources. Improving productivity can lead to increased profitability, higher quality outcomes, and better work-life balance.

• Materials Selection

Materials selection is the process of choosing the most appropriate materials for a specific engineering or manufacturing application. This decision is crucial because the properties of the chosen materials directly impact the performance, cost, and longevity of the final product.

• Materials Modification

Materials modification refers to the process of altering the properties and characteristics of materials to suit specific applications or improve their performance. This can involve changing the physical, chemical, or mechanical properties of a material. Materials modification is a critical aspect of materials science and engineering and is used in various industries, including manufacturing, electronics, healthcare, and more.

• In House Training, Coaching, & Educational Seminars

In-house training, coaching, and educational seminars are all valuable tools that organizations use to develop the skills and knowledge of their employees. Each of these approaches serves a different purpose and can be tailored to specific needs and objectives within your company.  Which you choose is dependent on your specific needs and the number of employees who need the training.

• Advice on Quality Control Methods and Procedures

Quality control is a crucial aspect of ensuring that products or services meet the desired standards and specifications. Implementing effective quality control methods and procedures can help improve product or service quality, reduce defects, and enhance customer satisfaction.  Flaney Associates has been instrumental in helping client’s improve quality in all procedures across both manufacturing and management processes.

• Troubleshooting Quality Problems

Troubleshooting quality problems is an essential aspect of any business or manufacturing process to ensure that products or services meet the desired quality standards and ironically the toughest for companies to identify.  Flaney Associates comes with a fresh eye, and a focus on solving the problems they identify.

• Bring New Products to Market

Bringing new products to market is a complex process that involves several key steps. Whether you’re a startup, an established company, or an individual entrepreneur, following a general framework can help guide you through the product development and launch process.  Flaney Associations can help build the framework and implement the steps.

• Compounding

• Formulating All Forms of Colorants

Formulating colorants involves creating a wide range of colors and pigments for various applications, such as paints, inks, cosmetics, and dyes. The specific formulation depends on the intended use and the type of colorant you want to create.

• Extrusion and Injection Molding

Extrusion and injection molding are two popular plastic manufacturing processes used to create a wide range of plastic products and components. Both methods involve shaping plastic material into specific forms, but they differ in their techniques and applications.  Flaney Associates understands the benefits of both these options and can advise you on the which would be the best and most cost effective for your situation.

Test Data Acquisition, Interpretation and Analysis

Test data acquisition, interpretation, and analysis are essential steps in the process of conducting tests and experiments in various fields, including science, engineering, software development, and quality assurance.  Flaney Associates has extensive expertise in all levels of testing data.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.