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A Brief History of Burgener Research Inc.

Burgener Research Inc. (BR) was incorporated in 1995. It was an expansion of our associated company, Technical Solutions unLimited (TSU), which was started in 1988. Technical Solutions was an outgrowth of our company Burgener Technical Enterprises / Technical Service Laboratories (BTE), which was started in 1947.

BTE was one of the top 3 laboratories in Canada in 1990 when I and my partners sold it. We had over 150 employees, and branches in Mississauga, Timmins, Noranda, Saskatoon, Spokane, and Newfoundland. We were in the process of starting up a lab in Mexico in 1990, and we had jointly ventured in the creation and operations of several other companies: Activation Laboratories, Trulogic (now Questron Canada) and Cambridge Testing. We owned Burtec Inc. of Albany, NY (now in Oakville, Ontario) which made sampling devices for the steel industry.

We typically ran 1000+ whole rock samples, 2000+ gold fire assays, 1000+ geochem multi element analysis, 500+ environmental samples and a lot of other miscellaneous category testing every day during the peak seasons of May to October, and about 1/2 to 1/5 of that in the quieter months.

To keep such a lab operating and growing at the 150% to 200% per year that we sustained from 1980 to 1990, we had to be very innovative and highly computerized and mechanized. We developed new ICP instrumentation, new ICP operating software, Laboratory LIMS systems, automated computer software for calculating and reporting results from ICP and other instruments, automated sample prep equipment and constantly developed new and better methods of analysis. We were certified by the Standards Council of Canada for over 2000 analytical methods, a record not matched by any other lab in Canada. We were certified by all of the car manufacturers in Canada, the US and Canadian military and by many other groups.

Our expertise with computers and machinery and instrumentation was a major factor in our success. In 1987, we had a fully integrated LIMS system that still is better than anything I have seen available today by other software companies. We were able to hold 2 years of all our data on our IBM PC, immediately available to our service reps and customers, entirely searchable in 2 seconds, on computers over 1000 times slower than present ones. We developed new instruments constantly, and from this background I have continued in developing new products in Burgener Research.

When I sold BTE in 1990, I kept Technical Solutions unLimited and the rights to software and nebulizers. We had to develop nebulizers that could run our Lithium Metaborate solutions, as all glass nebulizers plugged on the solutions in a few minutes, and we needed long term stability for the whole rock analysis. The Legere nebulizer was our solution for the problem. But the Legere was difficult to make. The Burgener Parallel Path design was developed to help a customer who needed a non salting nebulizer but who could not use the Legere nebulizers. With the introduction of the BTS 50 nebulizer in 1993, our nebulizer portion of the business began to outgrow our computer side of the business, and in 1995 we had sufficient nebulizer related work to warrant starting a separate company - Burgener Research Inc.

Our main sales are to the USA, but about 40% of the sales are Europe, Africa, and Asia. In 2013 we produced our 25,000th nebulizer, and in 2021 we produced our 50,000th.

We have been developing new products in related lines. We have several industrial nebulizer designs being marketed for very high flow and very low flow situations. As far as we are aware, there is no limit to the flow rates able to be run on our Parallel Path designs. We have had requests for flows as high as 1000 Liters/minute for desalination plants, and for 5o nanoliters/minute for HPLC integration to ICP/MS systems.

Burgener Research is focused on mixing gases and liquids. This also relates to our involvement with companies such as Rotary Rocket, Xcor Aerospace and Rocketplane Global, which were developing rocket engines and passenger carrying rocketplanes. Rocket engines are essentially large nebulizers using oxygen and liquid fuel instead of argon and water. But many of the scientific principals are the same.







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