Collaborate with a Swagelok Engineer in the Customer Briefing Center

Seeing the full range of Swagelok products in one place can be an eye-opener

You may be able to tell that we have a lot of fun with our Customer Briefing Center. As we've written before, this is a special room where we've assembled a complete interconnected fluid system that shows off Swagelok products and our Assembly Solutions skills.

The five panels in the system demonstrate gas delivery, distribution and flow control, a model of the processes in a nuclear fusion power plant, hydraulic controls, and analytical instrumentation.

The fun comes in two basic ways. One way is simply bringing customers into the room and watching their eyes widen.

"Questions vary with who we have in there," said Neil Ide, our Assembly Solutions product manager. "If we have a fluid system engineer, they might have a tremendous amount of questions on the system configuration. More often than not, though, we get customers who are relying on us to be the experts. They are completely blown away, saying things like, 'Wow, I didn’t know that all of this existed.'

Ide happened to meet a customer by chance at the Will Call desk not long ago. They got to talking about some of the displays we have there, and that inspired the customer to ask more questions about Swagelok's inventory. Ide brought the customer into the CBC, and before long they were talking about collaboration on a new project.

Real life demonstrations

Ide likes the Gas Delivery panel in part because of the high-quality RHPS pressure regulators used in it. "We have several models that have, effectively, a flat flow curve on them," he said. The bad news is that a lot of customers don't know what that means. The good news is that the Gas Delivery panel provides a practical demonstration: Many pressure regulators can't hold the pressure steady when the flows get extremely high or low.

"We can physically demonstrate on the Gas Delivery panel the difference between the RHPS regulators and the more conventional regulators," Ide says. "That's really powerful. You get to see not only the flow chart on the back of the catalog, but also this very physical thing that is demonstrated. That really galvanizes people's mental image of the technology."

Ide's favorite panel, however, is labeled Process. That's a modest name for what is actually an artistic rendering of a cold-fusion nuclear power plant. It took the most effort to construct, and was a real team effort at Swagelok Northern California.

Challenges

Ide created the CBC over the course of about 15 months, fitting the work in where he could while also doing his main job. He's rightly proud of his work, as a project gets much more complex as various parts and systems need to interact. Even though it's a model, the interconnected panels still had to work properly.

It's worth the trip, so book your own personal tour of the Customer Briefing Center. We're proud to show it off, you'll probably have a lot of fun putting the panels through their paces, and we can talk about ways that you can take advantage of the full range of Swagelok products and services in your fluid systems.

Visit our Customer Briefing Center and discuss your application challenges with a Swagelok engineer. Learn more at http://northerncal.swagelok.com/ask-engineer 

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