When Gregory Butler, vice president of operations with Magnus Bio-Medical Technologies, approached the Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program for technical help, he had no way of knowing just how fast or effective SATOP’s assistance could be. To Butler’s surprise, in just two weeks he was handed a solution that would more than quadruple the company’s productivity.

Magnus Bio-Medical Technologies, a small business in Ocala, Fla., manufactures the Calgitrol™ line of water-based gel matrix wound dressings. Calgitrol dressings are used on burn patients, diabetics, and others with hard-to-heal wounds at hospitals, nursing homes and burn centers throughout the nation. The gel matrix is manufactured into large sheets, which are placed on racks for drying, before it is cut to the desired size. Drying times could be as long as 72 to 96 hours, which limited Magnus Bio-Medical’s productivity.
Butler says that the company had tried on its own to shorten the drying time by putting the gel matrix sheets on a conveyor belt through a heat tunnel, or by baking the sheets in a large industrial oven. Neither attempt produced good results – the heat caused uneven drying and curling of the sheets.

Next, Butler tried putting the sheets in a small tent containing a household dehumidifier and found that the drying time was decreased, but not by much. “At that point, we knew that dehumidifying worked best without heat, but we were stumped as to how to apply that knowledge on a large scale,” Butler says.
The Ocala/Marion Economic Development Council recommended that Butler give SATOP a call. SATOP put Butler in contact with Jack Shye at Precision Fabricating & Cleaning Co., Inc. (PFC), a long-time Space Alliance Partner. PFC has been involved in micro-cleaning and drying of aerospace components and equipment for 36 years and as a result, has direct experience in drying a large variety of items made of many different materials. Because much of PFC’s work takes place in environmentally controlled work areas, the company also has a considerable amount of experience in temperature and humidity control.

Shye spoke with Butler almost every day and put together a task team at PFC to evaluate Magnus Bio-Medical’s problem. In less than two weeks, Shye presented Butler with a formal report offering three different possible solutions. Of the three, a closed loop air-conditioning/refrigeration chamber was preferred. In the chamber, cold air would flow over the gel sheets while they rested on racks equipped with heat strips. The cold air would absorb the moisture vapor released by the gel sheets. The air would then exit the chamber, be cooled again and reintroduced to the chamber.
Butler constructed the new drying chamber facility based on Shye’s recommendations. In preliminary tests, Butler was delighted to find that drying times had been reduced to as little as 23 hours – less than one quarter of the original drying time. Butler also was pleased that the assistance he received was free and the solution was inexpensive to implement.

“I could not have imagined that we would be given a solution that would work so well and be so affordable,” Butler said. “Quadrupling productivity would have been nearly impossible without the help we received from PFC and SATOP.”