Rose-Hulman Ventures helped Glas-Col create one controller for countless applications

Having engineering and scientific expertise on staff doesn’t necessarily mean a manufacturer always has the bandwidth to develop new products internally. Exploring new directions still may need a call to a helper such as Rose-Hulman Ventures.

That has been the case for Terre Haute-based Glas-Col LLC, maker of a wide range of laboratory and industrial equipment. “One of our big product families is temperature controllers,” says Tim Voll, engineering manager, a 1988 Rose-Hulman graduate in chemistry. “We manufacture 20 to 30 standard temperature controllers and literally hundreds of customized temperature controllers.”

The company last year was interested in developing a multichannel temperature control, able to control up to four devices. “We wanted to give more flexibility in making our products so we would not have the need to continue making so many custom products.”

The midsized company’s in-house expertise includes a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer and an applications engineer, but that didn’t mean internal product development was going to work well with Glas-Col’s business model. “To be able to do product-development work is very time-consuming and resource-hungry,” Voll says. “In order to be able to finish this product in a timeframe that is business-friendly to us, we decided to outsource.”

So Glas-Col connected with Rose-Hulman Ventures, provided technical specifications for the product it wanted to develop and scheduled meetings, and together the teams launched into development of the new product. “This is used to control heaters, another big product family that Glas-Col manufactures. It is more complex and flexible and versatile. Instead of making entirely customized products for specific applications, we wanted to have a single item that could do a multitude of different things,” Voll says.

Electrical and design work were the biggest needs. Rose-Hulman Ventures designed a circuit board to achieve four-channel control and offered computer programming to develop firmware packages, allowing different channels to be separately controlled and programmed with temperature profiles.

“Rose-Hulman Ventures did all of the programming work for all of the electrical hardware to achieve the controlling specifications. We also asked them to do the design work for the chassis that would hold this technology. Their mechanical people developed a chassis and a cover and came up with the interface for the touchscreen embedded in the product and the input receptables on the front and back of the product,” Voll explains, adding that Rose-Hulman Ventures has delivered a prototype. “We have been able to start touching and feeling and sorting out what the screen looks like.”

Before the current project, Glas-Col had in the past tapped into Rose-Hulman Ventures for technical support in areas such as engineering design and modifications, “and I also have my own personal connection to Rose-Hulman. We restarted our business conversation with Nathan Elder (director of business development), and connected with Jonathan Labayo (electrical), Matthew Fulford (computer programming) and Gage Wilkinson (mechanical), plus a number of interns.”

Because Glas-Col is just half a dozen miles from Rose-Hulman, it’s no surprise that there are strong connections. Voll says the company has employed Rose-Hulman graduates such as himself, plus interns from the institution. “They are just brilliant people,” he says of the Rose-Hulman Ventures team. “They know what they’re gifted at, and it is a good experience for the interns to work with business pressures such as cost and time—not just innovation and technology and bells and whistles, but also business concerns with every product of this nature. It is good exposure for the students in that regard,” he says.

“And of course,” he adds, “it saves us some costs. It is impressive.”