The Applied Polymer Research Center at the University of Akron’s College of Polymer Science & Polymer Engineering is a creation of the area’s small business community — indirectly, at least.
According to Kent Marsden, the college’s director of administrative services, during the 1960s, the university began receiving requests from small businesses and industries to develop a testing center “to use the expertise of in-house facilities and people to service the greater polymer community in Northeastern Ohio and beyond.”
The idea wasn’t exactly a new one. Marsden says the university had been “doing the business of polymer, rubber and plastics research” since 1910, when it began teaching rubber chemistry in the science college. But as the polymer community grew, so did its needs for a complete research facility that accepted projects on a job-by-job basis, without long-term binding research agreements, issues of intellectual property rights, etc.
That facility has evolved into a high-tech lab-for-hire with access to the college’s extensive research facilities. The center’s staff of five full-time employees (all scientists with advanced degrees) provides services to companies big and small, some as far away as France and Brazil.
But center manager Bob Seiple estimates that 60 percent of the 1,500 clients which have gone to the center in the last 15 years are Ohio companies, smaller enterprises that cannot afford research facilities or technical people of their own.
“They are manufacturers, for the most part, who crank out a product,” Marsden says.
“Our main focus is to be here to assist those companies that can’t afford to have a half-million dollars’ worth of instrumentation on site,” Seiple says.
A decent lab, he adds, would cost approximately two to three times that figure — and that doesn’t include the $120,000 to $150,000 in annual salaries for a couple of technicians and a supervisor. Such an investment isn’t always warranted.
“Many of these companies don’t have ongoing problems,” he says.
The 400 to 500 projects the center accepts each year range from the simple to the complex. Seiple says a typical in-and-out job might involve a small manufacturer whose customer requires independent confirmation that a material it uses to make a product meets specific guidelines — the material might have to withstand heat to an exact degree, for example.
“Polymers aren’t exact materials,” he says. “There’s a lot of things that can change in the manufacturing process if the manufacturing parameters are not controlled within a very tight tolerance.”
The center can perform tests and measurements and provide results in a matter of hours.
“It’s very important that these folks get this turned around in a reasonable amount of time because they’ve got product sitting in a warehouse that they can’t ship until they get this data point,” Seiple says.
A more involved project might concern a product — say, a rubber mat — that isn’t standing up to wear and tear like it did a few months ago. The center can “tear apart” two rubber compounds, analyze the differences in composition, and determine how they affect performance.
Seiple says such a service, which can take two or three weeks, is helpful to companies that mold products but do not mix the materials from which they’re made.
“In a given formulation, there can be anywhere from, say, five ingredients to perhaps 20,” he says. “Many of these custom mixers, if they own the formulation or the recipe, will change ingredients based on economics or availability.”
A number of businesses go to the center with more time-consuming endeavors, perhaps a request to develop a compound that meets certain guidelines for a product it wants to make.
Some of Seiple’s examples of the work done at the Applied Polymer Research Center are intentionally vague, because one of the facility’s most valuable commodities is confidentiality.
“Many clients don’t like the fact that they’re even in here known to the general public,” he says.
A business’s very association with the center, he says, may be construed by some customers as evidence of a problem with a product. Seiple says that the center’s regulars — 100 or so — like the one-on-one relationship that develops from driving to the center, sitting down at a table and solving a problem, rather than doing it through faxes, e-mails and telephone calls.
Such close contact helps control the scope and direction of projects, as well as their costs.
“We never get so far out in dollars or in trying to tackle a problem that the client is really upset when he leaves here,” Seiple says. “He guides the project; we don’t guide it.”
Although the University of Akron is a state school, the center itself is a self-supporting entity that reinvests profits in upgraded equipment and facility expansion. Seiple says the center’s services are generally billed at $110 an hour, a rate he describes as “very reasonable” for a lab of this type. (Businesses that hire the facility to work on a long-term project or a number of projects receive a volume discount determined on a case-by-case basis.)
Center staffers are responsible for discussing projects with clients, writing up purchase orders and invoicing. No university bureaucracy is involved.
“We have been given a blanket OK by the university to provide these services to industry,” Seiple says. “We don’t have to jump through hoops to make that happen.
“If we had to jump through hoops, then we wouldn’t have a client base.” How to reach: The Applied Polymer Research Center at the University of Akron’s College of Polymer Science & Polymer Engineering, (330) 972-7542
