High-tech gizmo takes high-speed, X-ray images of explosions

Folks love to bemoan the decline of America’s — and Virginia’s — manufacturing sector. Michael Appleby wants to do his little part to change that.

Appleby is president and CEO of Mikro, a decade-old company based off Greenbrier Drive in Albemarle County. Mikro grabbed a piece of the spotlight last week when a project it was a part of won a prestigious contest for new innovations.

The winning gizmo, developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is a camera that can create high-resolution, high-speed X-ray images of explosions. It was one of 100 exceptional new devices announced as winners of R&D Magazine’s R&D 100 contest.

Mikro created a grid, made of polymer and powdered tungsten, placed at the front of the camera, that holds special crystals in place, allowing scientists to convert the X-rays to readable energy and channel them back toward the camera’s image-capturing device, Appleby said.

The grid is one of several high-tech specialty projects the company has worked on using “tomo lithographic molding.” That means workers etch thin sheets of metal into cross sections of the object they want to create, then stack them to make the outline of the final product. Then, a mold is cast from the assembled pattern, Appleby said.

Now the company, which is privately held and controlled by its three founders, Appleby among them, is moving from a research-driven, one-off product mode to the commercialization of those technologies.

For example, the know-how used to make the grid for the X-ray camera translated nicely into making similar, but smaller, grids for CT scanners, said Appleby, a former product development manager.

So far, the company has made headway commercializing technology in the medical imaging and power generation fields, he said.

It’s producing ceramic inserts for the casting of turbine blades. The company is in a multi-million-dollar development agreement with Siemens and moving toward a commercial contract, Appleby said.
“They had ideas, but they couldn’t make them,” said Stan Maupin, managing director of Transact Capital Partners, which is working with Mikro.

Manufacturing is done at the company’s 13,000-square-foot headquarters.

Appleby described the company as “almost” profitable, and revenues in 2010 are expected to be nearly $1 million stronger than in 2009.

Even as the business grows, officials don’t see it moving.

“Our objective is to stay here in Charlottesville for all the reasons everyone else wants to be here,” Appleby said.

And Appleby said that even as the company moves to commercialization, he wants to maintain a strong research arm at the company.

“We’re not going to leave that behind,” he said.

He also said the fast turnaround time of the molding technology gives it an advantage in checking out new ideas.

Robert E. Spekman, the Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business Administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, said staying cutting-edge is the key to staying in America.

“If you’re constantly innovating, if you’re looking for new ways of doing things and are on top of your game, there should be no reason that you can’t continue to manufacture here,” he said.
Otherwise, “run-of-the-mill” work is being increasingly sent abroad, Spekman said.

“Manufacturing isn’t sexy anymore,” he said. “Outsourcing is sexy.”