Jensen Inert Products….in outer space…
In coordination with Jacobs Technology (Engineering and Science Contract Group) of Houston TX, Jensen Inert Products recently had the honor of producing extremely high quality Tedlar® bags for use in the United States space program.
Jensen Inert Products Tedlar® bags accompanied shuttle missions STS-130 (Endeavour) and STS-131 (Discovery) to the International Space Station on February 8 and April 5, 2010. The bags were used to store the epoxy composite, Shuttle Tile Ablator-54, used with the Tile Repair Ablator Dispenser (T-RAD) for emergency repair and maintenance of exterior ceramic tiles on the shuttle while in orbit.
Click to read more
Over the course of 4 months, Jacobs auditors reviewed all aspects of Jensen’s gas and liquid sampling bag manufacturing operations, including:
- Internal quality audits
- Design and development control
- Procurement control
- Nonconformance information feedback and controls
- Fabrication control
- Process control
- Traceability from receipt through shipping, testing, inspection and evaluation
- Handling, storage, packaging, and shipping
- Manufacturing and production software controls
- Equipment maintenance frequency
Due to high failure rates of bags previously supplied by another vendor, the initial request by Jacobs was for a quantity of 4000 bags. However, due to the excellent quality and performance of the Jensen bags, the order was scaled down to only 1600 bags to reflect the significantly decreased failure rate estimates.
In addition to the pride felt by every employee at Jensen in helping to serve our national space program, we are very excited by this public opportunity to display not only our quality work and state of the art assembly equipment, but also to demonstrate the range of applications and capabilities of our line of gas and liquid sampling bags.
While the recent shuttle missions made use of specialized Tedlar® containment bags without fittings, Jensen Inert Products also offers high-quality Tedlar®, FEP, PFA, TFM and Aluminized gas sampling bags in a range of valve and fitting configurations.
We recently introduced our new proprietary Tedlar® film substitute, Altef. Altef is an Alternative Tedlar Equivalent Film priced significantly lower than Tedlar. Altef film is readily available, and now a standard Jensen Inert Products inventoried item.