Concordia Medical, located in Warwick, RI, is an innovator in specialty fiber-based medical implants and scaffolds for regenerative medicine. Concordia Medical’s products include twisted and textured fibers, knit meshes, braided structures, and BIOFELT®, a proprietary needle-punched non-woven felt scaffold material.
Individual fiber filaments and knit, braided, and non-woven structures are tensile tested for uniformity and strength. Concordia Medical had been using a Sintech (now MTS) universal testing machine that it shared with its parent company, Concordia Fibers. In order to support growth, additional testing capability was needed, as well as updating the operating system for the Sintech system.
Ian Christianson, Quality Assurance/Regulatory Affairs Manager, considered retrofitting the Sintech machine. However, he discovered that for a relatively modest premium over a retrofit he could replace the Sintech with an ADMET machine that would give him a dedicated machine and free up the older unit for continued use at Concordia Fibers.
Concordia ordered an ADMET eXpert 2611 electromechanical, dual column tabletop universal testing machine (UTM) equipped with ADMET’s MTESTQuattro Materials Testing System, an advanced PC-Based controller with advanced analysis and reporting capabilities.
Commented Christianson, “We have our own internal quality requirements but depending on what our customers are looking for, we are able to conduct other tests and report different findings. That’s one of the benefits of the machine — its flexibility. It’s actually a very good product development machine. We’re not tensile testing experts but we’ve been able to create all the programs that we need so that the test methods meet the requirements”.
