Applying Innovative Engineering To Industrial Challenges

In the late 1990s Jeffress Engineering realised they needed to move into high technology products to remain relevant and viable. The chosen strategy was to combine the best of the old and the new – modern technology applied to the enhancement of fundamentally sound engineering products. The company began investing heavily in R&D, the result of which was a focus on near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) as a clean, fast and accurate adjunct to standard laboratory measurements.

One of their NIR development projects was the JEFFCO BevScan®. This was done in collaboration with the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI), who needed a device that could analyse wine through the bottle without opening and destroying the wine.

Its development called for a combination of precision mechanical and optical engineering skills, new spectroscopy techniques and innovative software using data analysis. Managing Director, Colin Jeffress explains “We knew what we wanted to achieve conceptually for the new device but did not have the resources or mathematical and statistical skills in-house to develop the software to accomplish our vision. We needed to turn spectroscopy into a fast ‘black box’ technique for users who did not have the necessary understanding of statistical maths.”

“We needed the support of a well-known and widely available data analysis package but one that would allow us to reduce our new similarity detection concept to a core module. The core module would need to process live data from the spectrometer and then, unseen by the end user, work silently and quickly in the background to give commonsense and easily interpreted answers from complex mathematical formulae.”