Table of Contents
Assignment background
The manufacturing of antibody test kits requires a process to precisely apply a water-soluble reagent onto test strips in extremely fine lines. This reagent contains specific molecules (usually antibodies or antigens) that react with the target antigen or substance, and is an extremely expensive material. This has presented the following challenges:
- Increased costs due to fluid waste and dead volume
With existing coating devices, a lot of residual liquid remains inside the nozzle, and the reagent is not used up to the last drop, so it is discarded. - Unstable discharge control makes precise line application difficult
Excessive reagent dispensing resulted in a lot of waste, which led to increased reagent costs and inefficient work. - Cost of cleaning and replacing equipment
There were many parts, and cleaning and switching reagents took time.
Benefits
The introduction of the high-precision contactless dispenser “NOVADOT” has resulted in the following results:
- Expensive water-soluble reagents can be used without waste
NOVADOT’s optimized nozzle structure minimizes dead volume, allowing you to use up all the reagent, significantly reducing waste. This reduces expensive material costs and improves yield. - Stable, minute-volume application improves product precision
The non-contact discharge method enables uniform application even to extremely thin lines with a coating width of 1 mm or less. High reproducibility significantly improves inspection performance and reliability. - Improved maintainability
With fewer wetted parts, cleaning and changing of fluids is easy. This prevents frequent line stoppages and contributes to improving production operation rates.
Introduced products
NOVADOT high-precision non-contact dispenser
A non-contact dispenser specialized for expensive water-soluble reagents such as those used in antibody tests. It achieves both high accuracy and low loss even when dispensing minute amounts of reagent.
- Minimizes dead volume and allows for efficient use of reagents
- Ideal for low to medium viscosity fluids, including aqueous reagents
- Non-contact method for stable coating without damaging the substrate
- Achieves uniform line application of less than 1 mm
- Easy cleaning and fluid switching for excellent maintainability
