R&D will remain at the core of Global FIA's business but added income will be derived from manufacturing efforts such as large scale production of the APDS fluid handling systems and components. A manufacturing facility is being established at a second Fox Island location, known as the Beach Lab. This unique redundant Navy facility was purchased by Valco's Stearns and made available to Global FIA. Part of this facility has been configured as simple accommodation for visiting scientists thus enabling collaboration between Global FIA researchers and researchers from around the world.
Beach Lab
More recently, Global FIA has begun an endeavor to develop instrumentation suitable for laboratory and ship-board assays for chemical oceanographers. These efforts have begun with a modest start with deployment of an ammonia analyzer on a small single-man pontoon boat. Future efforts will be aimed at increasing robustness and instrument diagnostics to allow these devices to be deployed on more punishing platforms employed by oceanographers and other field scientists.
FloPro-Tracker on a small pontoon boat and ready for shipboard deployment
Although Global FIA has had some ups and downs, its growth has trended steadily upward. While in the early years the primary customers were from the FIA community, the versatile Zone Fluidics core technology has expanded the market. Nevertheless, Flow injection and Sequential injection "DNA" are evident in Zone Fluidics technology. Olson comments, "Our passion is innovation and over the years we have accumulated a rich resource of new components, devices, software, and systems useful in ZF as well as FIA and SIA. Our dream of applying the power of our core technology to a broad scope of applications ranging from sample prep to analyses spanning fields of use from medical devices to oceanography is being realized."