Innovation strength from everyday working life

A good example for this is one of the winning teams. Quality Manager Natalie Ganzauer and the Laboratory Technicians Brian Patrick Morrison and Julius Pollhäne from the WESSLING site in Berlin have jointly developed a new method for a more efficient analysis of food and feedstuffs. For example, foodstuffs are tested for several hundreds, which are partially very instable pesticides. The laboratory colleagues cool and powder the starting material to obtain a homogeneous sample and later to be able to make a representative report. So far, the laboratories used solid carbon dioxide, commonly known as ‘dry ice’, which cools the product to about minus 78 degrees Celsius. The Berlin team searched for alternatives and tried liquid nitrogen. The process of cryogenic comminution, as it is called, achieves extremely low temperatures of minus 196 degrees Celsius. This now for the first time enables a more precise and faster identification of particularly unstable sulphur-containing pesticides: dithiocarbamates. The procedure is so innovative that the company works on including this new process in the EU Commission’s quality guidelines for pesticide analysis in food and feedstuffs.

Award winner Dr József Horgos focused on a very different topic. In his capacity as a so-called ‘Qualified Person’, he has a very special task at the site in Hungary. Whenever WESSLING analyses pharmaceutical products for companies and approves them for market release, reference samples have to be professionally stored for up to one year beyond their expire date. On average, this is three to six years, in which Horgos is responsible for making sure that the medication  can be analysed again at any time, for example, in the event of complaints. So far, the pharmacist at the laboratory in Budapest only had space for 200 samples, which was by no means sufficient.  nowhere near enough. Therefore József Horgos has developed a specially secured cabinet that can be stacked on pallets in a special service provider’s high rack warehouse; if necessary, up to 2,000 pallets and around 112,000 samples can be stored in this way. Moreover, the warehouse  fulfils all guidelines regarding temperature and humidity and is only accessible only to  authorised personnel. Last, but not least, this also reduces the storage costs, which in turn benefits the WESSLING customers.

At WESSLING France, Head of IT Paul-Louis Curtaud and software developer Maxime Lerbret have contributed their knowledge to optimise test chamber tests that measure the emissions released by building materials in interior spaces. The tests take place in about 50 chambers which must have  clearly defined climatic conditions around the clock for 28 days. So far, the laboratory employees had to be constantly on site to monitor the humidity and temperature. The two award winners have now installed USB thermometers and hygrometer sensors that can be read remotely from any site by remote control. The probes are moreover used within a network, which saves physical computers and therefore space and costs. At the same time, the system provides more security because data loss is excluded, for instance, if the software on one computer is damaged. Paul-Louis Curtaud and Maxime Lerbret have additionally developed a programme that automatically saves the measured data every ten minutes.

WESSLING’s work is often complex and thus not easy to convey to others. Experts therefore often have to go into more detail hen presenting their expertise at the WESSLING Academy and numerous external events. Dr Peter Andersch, Technical Director of Laboratories at the Münster site, has found a way to present scientific contexts in a simple manner. In a technical lecture, he provides an introduction into complex topics such as physical and chemical interactions in an amusing and comprehensible manner and compares generics and original medicines In doing so, he uses a kind of representative: the ‘AnalyTiger’, a soft toy that provides more vividness and comprehensibility during the presentation. Andersch received praise and acknowledgement for his concept.