Ed started his career as an air conditioning technician, then decided to go back to school where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering. Working for a defense contractor, Ed cut his teeth doing stress analysis on Pro/ENGINEER Mechanica as well as developing his skills as a design engineer. These days, and for the past 20 years, Ed has been an engineer with Johnson & Johnson where he helps the company develop and manufacture contact lenses.
Pipeline Design & Engineering partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, or automation equipment but don’t have the bandwidth or resources internally to develop that equipment. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com .
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Ed started his career as an air conditioning technician, then decided to go back to school where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering. Working for a defense contractor, Ed cut his teeth doing stress analysis on Pro/ENGINEER Mechanica as well as developing his skills as a design engineer. These days, and for the past 20 years, Ed has been an engineer with Johnson & Johnson where he helps the company develop and manufacture contact lenses.
Pipeline Design & Engineering partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, or automation equipment but don’t have the bandwidth or resources internally to develop that equipment. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com .
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Welcome to the Being An Engineer Podcast. Our guest today is Ed Kernick, who works at Johnson and Johnson's Vision Division, where he's been a mechanical engineer for the past 20 years in manufacturing, R&D, and currently customer experience engineering. Before J&J, Ed worked as a stress analyst for a defense contractor, Ed, welcome to the Being An Engineer Podcast.
Ed Kernick:Thanks for having me on.
Aaron Moncur:You're very welcome. Okay. How did you decide, Ed, that you wanted to become an engineer?
Ed Kernick:So it's a long story. I'll try to keep it short. But, so, interesting. So my dad was a mechanical engineer. So most people say,'Oh, you followed your dad's footsteps.' Well, really wasn't that simple. So basically, I started off as a in high school, I was cruising along and I started taking air conditioning class too, my mom says, 'You're not going to goof off for the summer, get a job or go to vocational school.' So I went and got an air conditioning degree. So when I graduated, I just finished up and got my air conditioning certification. So I was a air conditioning mechanic. And I did that for about a year and my mom's like, 'You got to go to college now.' And I said, okay, okay, so I just went up to the college, I didn't have any goals. So I just registered. And I became into drafting. So I became a draftsman for a while. And then I worked, got a job in its defense contractor, and it was in a place called EJ Miller Check. And we did a lot of, they did stuff for like putting vision systems in aircraft and stuff like that for CIA and stuff like that. So I worked up and I was actually for Long Beach, Florida time, and I went up to they subcontract me place called Summit Aviation, Delaware. So I worked up there doing all the design drafting for the aircraft. While I came back, the vet contract expired, I came back to Fort Walton Beach. And then I got a job at a place called Metric Systems, which is now DRS. And so I was a draftsman there for a while. And, and I saw I worked with all mechanical engineers, that's pretty fun. So I was doing a lot of CAD stuff. And so I said,'I'm going to go back to school, I want to do controls engineering.' So I went back to school. And while I was working full time, and I started doing computer systems engineering, and what I didn't realize and computer systems, I love coding, but there's a lot of documentation. And I'm not a good documentation guy. And I'm going to get to that in a little bit. But anyway, so I ended up a semanas I'm writing these programs and I'm writing every line of code I gotta justify why I'm doing it so like I changed my major to mechanical engineering and at that point cuz I've been doing so much design work I've been doing design work probably three, probably three years at that point and maybe four years so I changed my major and this was working all the time that falling went back to college full time so it's gonna like a junior college, got all my credits, went to school full time got my mechanical engineering degree. So just sort of happened on to it after trying a couple other things
Aaron Moncur:Nice. Okay, as a kid, were you into like building Legos and I don't know, taking apart bicycles or working on cars or anything like that, or did that that aptitude that interest really develop a little bit later as you got into being a draftsman and working with other mechanical engineers?
Ed Kernick:I was always in Legos, Lincoln Logs and when I was 16, I'd be taking the parked cars or putting in stairs I was always hands on kind of guy so I enjoy that stuff.
Aaron Moncur:I love that you just mentioned Lincoln Logs, I haven't thought about that for years I used to build Lincoln Logs too, that was, they don't have those these days I don't know
Ed Kernick:Yeah. So in a funny little thing here I'm just gonna mention this because my mom said this to me the other day she goes, 'Aren't you glad I made you go to college and get air conditioning?' And I said well, no, she's, 'What do you mean no?' I said because if I stayed in here so I probably had 20 trucks right now and be like worth a couple million. No, just kidding, but she's like even got a point
Aaron Moncur:My dad is the one who suggested I become an engineer and I don't know if it was the same for you but I didn't put a whole lot of thought into it other than my dad thinks this is a good idea. So it's probably a good idea.
Ed Kernick:Yeah, yeah. Sort of happened to me. My mom's like, you know to college. I'm like, well, what's wrong with this air conditioning business? She goes, you'll you'll do think about it later in life. You'll be glad. So so I did. I took her advice and did it. Yeah. So it was a it was a good career path. And looking at a another example, my daughter was going to go to med school and she said she got all pumped up. And she was that she couldn't pass organic chemistry so now she's in computer engineering and I said that's a good choice because I'd read in when he graduated from computer engineering school you could be making I don't know 80-100k a year and or you can be in med school for 10 years and not be a top of your class you can't pass organic chemistry and that's 10 years of lost income. Yeah, that's a million dollars right there. So engineering, I think is a much better path if unless you have a passion to be a doctor or you're going to go in there and just ace it, but at lot less school and I think a better return on investment if you if that's what you enjoy doing.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah, people don't think about that all the time the loss of income, right, that you realize by going to school and I'm not saying school is not a good investment for a lot of people it is but I worry sometimes the people feel like school is the default like I just I have to do this because that's what everyone does. And I don't necessarily think that's the case I think it is a good path for a lot of people but like you said you go to school for four years Heaven forbid you go for six and get a master's or even longer right that's that's a lot of lost income especially if you're going to come out the other end making 70,80,90,000 a year that's a lot of lost income.
Ed Kernick:You really didn't, I think and I tell my kids this you got to follow your passion. Now if your passions saving sea turtles or, or playing music, that's great, but that may be a bit or playing sports and maybe a backup plan is that maybe you can always do that. But if you become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer some you'll make good money there you go safe and sea turtles in France somewhere over the summer, so you want to get it you want to follow your passion, but one that has income, but trade schools are good, too. I mean, obviously the trade schools I mean, look at the guys that come fix the air conditioners or your plumbers, I mean, these guys, if you own the company, they're doing very well. So, I, four years of college is great, but you got to have a passion for if you if you can't do math, or if you if you struggle with you hate it, then maybe an engineer wouldn't be a good job. If it's something that you despise doing. I know, I knew a lot of engineers or people when I was going to school, you probably do too that dropped out when business school or something like that.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I think trade schools are fantastic. And I mean big companies these days like Google, right have have, in the past just couple of years publicly stated that we're no longer requiring for your degrees for some of these technical positions. Not that it hurts to have it but you can you can get a high paying technical job by going to a trade school and just learning like these coding boot camps that are out there now without spending four years going to school. Anyway, I'm getting off on my diatribe here. Let's get back to uh, let's get back to engineering
Ed Kernick:On that same subject real quick that I did here. I just heard the other day that the federal government started to they aren't hiring, basically, on resumes of education, you're basically starting to hire an experience, which is pretty interesting.
Aaron Moncur:I love that, right?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, I agree. Yeah
Aaron Moncur:That's what matters. I mean, I get a resume from someone and I see, fou years at so and so engineeri g school. I don't really ca e about the piece of paper. Le Anyway, alright. So prior to Johnson and Johnson, me see what you've done. Sho me a little portfolio. Show me ome projects you've worked on, s ow me what you can do, not wha this, this piece of paper sa d you spent the last four year doing? which we'll get into, but you worked for a defense contractor as a design engineer and stressed out analyst. Can you tell us about some of the jobs that you worked on there?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, yeah. So I actually started off as a as a draftsman and then I went got my njsba came back. And so I did quite a few sets. One of the pretty cool one was a advanced targeting for looking forward. A flare for looking infrared unit. For the FAT, we want to contract subcontract on that for three Raytheon actually Fairchild child controls through Raytheon to put the cooling system so I did the electronic packaging. So this is a guy go dig a hole that was like the engineer did a lot of the stuff so this one was electronic packaging. So I had to create a electronic package that could go through all the Air Force requirements, which would be like salt spray, rapid decompression thermal in all the criteria and I was having a heart out but on top of that they want to commercial off the shelf parts. So now you're asking for all these military applications it's gonna sit on a runway, this is a piece of electronics and these runways are that heat they come from really probably hundreds of degrees and gotta to stay cool. So I had to do all the thermal analysis, structural shock and vibe all that so it's a lot of fun. At the end of the day, I was having problems with some of the shocking vibe from the aircraft landing we had to these power spectral density diagrams for the for the for the circuit car, so and then they want to like replacement units and things like that. So and I had to do, like I said, saw all these things, but so the end of day on the way got around most of this I actually potted the inside was little enclosure, probably about 10 inches by six inches by two inches deep. And it control all the cooling systems in this pod. So what we ended up doing is I just potted it with a potting compound. And it got rid of most of those requirements, because then again, didn't have any rapid decompression, because it was a sealed unit. And I'd have to worry about salt. I didn't have to worry about any air voids compressing and so that got rid of most of that, but I still had to do the thermal analysis and things like that. So that was a neat one.
Aaron Moncur:Did, did, did the potting, potting help at all with the thermal requirements?
Ed Kernick:Yes, I did add some, like, like the left engineers was why are you putting a aluminum T across our circuit board, that's why I'm gonna dump it, it's gonna make the original circuit board a little more rigid, and it'll actually dump some of the heat out. So that was one of them. We also did a couple more I can tell you one was a thyristor controller. And it was a big box and a Navy ships apparently Navy ships even when it's a really cold out, they'll run these they air conditioner just for humidifying out the sea. So this was a big controller for that. So I had the shock and vibe in that and when they when they do the shift the vibration in anathermal. And then what we ended up doing is we had the shock about so apparently the way they do the shock on there, they stick it on a on a barge and they blow it up. So I had to do all the analysis for that. And so it was fun project too, and the
Aaron Moncur:How do you do the analysis for something blowing up?
Ed Kernick:So I, they gave me a power spectral density platform and I put it in ANSYS actually, the time was pro engineer mecanica. And you put that in and again, and you can replicate it. And actually it did fail one of the big transformers, the screw broke out, we had to fix it, but everything else work. It was gonna say about that. Oh, the one lesson learned there. I said, I don't care about the stiffness, I'm really worried about this backbone. So all these other components are going to make like infinitely stiff, because I don't really want to analyze about carefully banned, I just can't care about the structural backbone. I couldn't get the model saw for two, three weeks. And I realized what I did is I created this a modular plasticity for these other components. Very, very, very high, I probably added extra 02. And my name could never converge. And I think what happened, I was getting these singularities. So I ended up going back and it took me a couple weeks to figure it out. And I made this module five more in line, and it solved right off the bat. So lesson learned, don't create these big huge variation in module size. This means we can also do the right.
Aaron Moncur:What's that for all the FEA solvers out there?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, yeah. We also did air cargo since we take like aircraft, and we put like, cargo systems. And so say it's an old, most middle class aircraft, but maybe it said 47. We would design all these cargo systems to hold in the lot of the equipment. So maybe a commercial aircraft they converted over. And and then we would do all the constraints and the tie downs and all that stuff. So so it's pretty neat job.
Aaron Moncur:That's very cool. I when, when you were going to school did was this the kind of thing that you expected that you would be doing or were there any surprises as you formally moved into a role as an engineer that you just didn't anticipate?
Ed Kernick:At that time, it was a pretty easy transition because I was a draftsman there before so I was doing a lot of this stuff, a draftsman designer, a lot of the science stuff already. I just, I do remember I was a draftsman and someone said, 'Hey, can you design as big a frame structure?'And I put all the IBM's backward my boss goes, what are you doing? He did this all wrong? I never knew cuz I was a draft, I didn't know how to do, set up the moment of inertia of the beam or anything like that?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah.
Ed Kernick:So there was a big there was a learning I went from learn how to use CAD to actually apply in CAD with the principles of engineering.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. I was gonna ask you about that. An old engineer that I worked with great guy would always say that documentation is the output of engineering and especially at a regulated industry, like medical devices, I'm sure that you have to deal with your fair share of that these days.
Ed Kernick:Yes, yes. And I think one of the questions you're gonna ask me I got a nice complain about documentation, but I guess we'll get there.
Aaron Moncur:Okay. All right. Well, moving on to Johnson & Johnson in their, their Vision Department. I didn't even realize that there was specifically like a vision division of the company but that's, that's where you are working. You helped develop a high speed manufacturing line there. That seems like a huge undertaking, right? I mean, you're putting together a line in in a factory somewhere. What all was involved in installing a system like that? How long did it take? What were some of the challenges you ran into?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, so it was a big when I moved, there was a big paradigm shift from going from making for looking infrared or putting GPS and bombs and things like that was a big change to this high speed manufacturing environment. So we had to do, a lot of the stuff is, we got to make a lot of contact lenses inexpensive, and a lot with high quality. So some of these machines will make 200,000 300,000 lens leveling, not 250,000, lenses, a shift, so maybe 501 machine could make 500,000 lens a day
Aaron Moncur:Wow
Ed Kernick:We probably make 13 million lens a day, we make about 5 billion a year out of that one of those numbers. So, so back to what was what exactly was that question again so I can make sure I answered it correctly.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I was just wondering what all is involved in installing a major production line like that, what what are some of the challenges that you ran into?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, so there's always making contact lenses fairly complicated, because he got a lot of quality. And so it's, it's basically a, it's a monomer, liquid resin that's cured. And it's got to be comfortable and optically clear and and, and also have the right prescription. So when you cure something, it shrinks, and it gets a visual acuity issues and things like that. So these are, your equipment needs to make sure it doesn't modify any of that we got it. Obviously, being a medical device, it's got to be it's got to be validated. And then you have to get through all the validation procedures, and a lot of challenges. And there's always deadlines and budgets that you have to meet just like any project. So there's a lot of challenges. Some of the more specific challenges may just be very tight tolerances. And some of these things when you're dealing with these small, small contact lens and precision, one examples, we cast Moeller lenses. So with the make hero, and then you have to remove the mold the back, well, you got to be very careful. So you don't want to turn these lenses you've seen contact lenses, right?
Aaron Moncur:Sure. Yeah.
Ed Kernick:Very thin. So you don't want to tear the lens is d laminated. So that's a very critical process, you need very high precision parts. Very nice, slow servo following a server profile, they can delaminate this part without tearing because you may if you lose 1% of your product, you're making 13 million lenses a day. That's quite a big, big loss over a year.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. So what kind of, what kind of tolerances do you need to adhere to making contact lenses?
Ed Kernick:Well, and the machine design portion, we're looking at plus or minus, see, I've seen 1000s or millimeters we can say point one millimeters typical, typical tolerance for us but we'll start doing these little pieces of equipment and we get down to see what the point oh 1 million would that be no point oh two five, that'd be about 1000 so we can get down to the 1000s a couple 1000s but now we talked about molding the molds for the contact lens and now we're talking about the microphones we got because
Aaron Moncur:Really
Ed Kernick:Yeah, you got, I mean with the lens itself 300 microns thick and we got multifocal lenses that have different powers as you look so very precision and and I guess we're more that lens making and then he had the metrology that goes along with it because you when you make it you have to be able to measure it right
Aaron Moncur:Oh yeah. How do you how do you measure something like that?
Ed Kernick:So we use a lot of
Aaron Moncur:Optical, huh?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, yeah, well, we measure molds with some optical measurement systems and then we well we measure the our inserts the brassens we, we injection mold the plaza, here's what we make linspace we start with a everything's everything goes on in these machines as raw material. So we'll put pellets on the machines and then we injection mold these pellets and we create a front curve and a backer basically it's a cup and we're making a little peanut butter sandwich right so the bottom of the cup, we put this liquid monomer in there and then the top of the cup we close the back that's the back portion that's the part that touches your eye and that would be the base curve and a front curve is part with a prescription so every we change these moles out to change prescriptions, then we get a photo and thermal cure. And once we do that we have to delaminate and then we have to wash any excess processing aids out of it and hydration and then we injection mold the lens package you put it in there we heat seal it, sterilize it, put in a secondary carbon package and send it out the door. So yeah, so we inspect that stuff. That's what's gonna get out we inspect the actual inserts using some of these a interferometers and then we also inspect the plastic is it the plastic cures After its injection molds, we got inspect that, and then now we have 100% inspection, also the contact lens after cures with a traditional vision system. So we inspect everything that goes through. So we got a couple of BLM process inspections as we go through the system.
Aaron Moncur:And all that happens fast enough to crank out 13 million lenses a day. That's incredible.
Ed Kernick:Yes.
Aaron Moncur:I, for me, I don't love going to like theme parks like Disneyland or things like that. But the the analog of going to a theme park for me would be to go to a high volume manufacturing facility like you're describing, and seeing all these machines working and pumping out the product 13 million lenses a day that would be just fascinating to watch.
Ed Kernick:Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's a lot of fun. Well, when you first get there, but then when you're working on it every day, it's not quitting.
Aaron Moncur:And it's just work, right? Yeah.
Ed Kernick:And I have given people tours that some people non engineers think it's pretty cool. But then we got our distribution facility. And that's probably more like an Amazon and the people that are not really engineers think the distributions go because you can see these big boxes moving around, pick the light and all that that's really neat, too. But uh, for a design engineer, there's there's more interested in the machine and all the tolerances and all the moving parts and air cylinders, service. And robots, each machine may have five or six robots, and we have 85 manufacturing machines or some odd manufacturing machines, and each machine may have five, six robots on there, your vision systems everywhere. So a lot a lot of vision systems too
Aaron Moncur:Okay, yeah. Well, this is probably a good chance to take a little pause and share with our listeners that the Being An Engineer Podcast is powered by Pipeline Design & Engineering, where we don't do anything related to oil. But we do work with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey custom test fixtures or automated equipment, to assemble, inspect, characterize or perform verification or validation testing on their devices. And you can find us at testfixturedesign.com. We're speaking with Ed Kernick today, a mechanical engineer in Vision Group at Johnson & Johnson. So something else that you had told me about, Ed, was these vending machines for I guess, probably just dispensing contact lenses. Now, when he said a vending machine is that like, I'd go up and get a soda and a bag of chips at the grocery store in that kind of form factor.
Ed Kernick:Similar to that. So the that is a problem with with using a traditional vending machine is, we, on the contact lens, we are an inter ocular lens, or even the implant or any of these things, there's multiple skews. So if you go to a vending machine to buy Coke, you may have a selection of 50 parts that are 30, deep, where some of the stuff we're working on is I may have 1000 parts 1500 parts, and they can all be different in any random location. We just scan them as they go in. And the avenues of the rat are using a pick the light as they come out, so you can uh, so the doctor says, I want this contact lens, and the machine lights up, and he just pulls that lens out, and re inventories, and then the we set a new product. So it's very easy. So right now is he currently is go to the shelf and look around and see what's there. And if they don't have good inventory, that the customer will be waiting in the pants that the patient may be waiting to get iron lens on the eye, and the doctors up, I don't have that I want to go to your competitor. So now we have a method where the doctor knows exactly where his inventory is, and we know where it's at, too. So we can replenish his inventory within a day or two.
Aaron Moncur:So it's really an inventory management system.
Ed Kernick:Yes.
Aaron Moncur:Got it, okay. And it's
Ed Kernick:That's part of this customer experience group that we're in here that says throughout the year, any anything we can enhance our customers, which the patients and the doctors are customers.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that this customer enhancement, engineering, right, what what all is involved in that? What are some of the projects that you've worked on in that group?
Ed Kernick:In that group? Well, we work on anything, too. We we look at our customer complaints, and that's one, we also go out to doctors offices and figure out what are the any problems that they're having and how can we help and then we do a parade of is the biggest impact that will help our customers, whether it be the doctor, or the end user, the patient and, and is an easy fix, so we look at these and we weigh them, and then we'll, we'll purchase things like what was the vending machine. That's a help to the doctors helps her inventory. We got tons of inventory out there and we can sort of get better track of it. But other things could be if we have a missing link, send a package or if we have a any any kind of quality thing where we try to stay ahead of all of our quality to keep the top notch quality. So we're always anything if customer complaints, we try to dig into it and figure out what the root causes and go after it, and we use copy. And a lot of these means Six Sigma, black belt and things like that, or Red X technology or these. One split the dictionary technologies, but a lot of these troubleshooting methods, the find out the root cause of these things and fixing.
Aaron Moncur:It sounds like you get to enjoy quite a bit of customer interaction in that role. Do you, do you enjoy going out to speak with the customers or would you rather be at your desk working at your computer in a cubicle by yourself?
Ed Kernick:I like speaking to the customers because he you sometimes when you hear I mean, typical engineers, like at least in right now your marketing or your sales reps will come back. And they'll say something to someone or, or we'll get a customer complaint. And they'll go through the customer complaint thing. And then we do a credo and we just look at this complaint. And it's like, it's like a Twitter, right? It's like 20 lines of text or 256 characters a very small amount of information. When you actually talk to these people up, they may these complaints may be totally different than they may be using different vocabulary, right? So if you go talk to the doctors like, yeah, and I'll say this is one of our number of complaints. And they're like, Well, yeah, yeah, but it's really, I've noticed if you do this, like there was one complaint where we, one of our lenses, were having a handful people are saying we're having visual acuity, it turns out, he talked to the doctor said,'Well, if you just set the box in different position, that actually fixed.' So we came back and we did a project to make sure that lands, always retains that position throughout. So a lot of we get a lot of learnings from talking to the customers. A lot of may have already solve their problem on a persona level. And I want to take tha back and actually incorporat into manufacturing
Aaron Moncur:I think engineers get a bad rap in that area, right? People think of engineers is we just want to sit at a cubicles in our desk and pound away in our computer and not talk to anyone. Well, I had been I'm guilty of that sometimes. But most of the engineers I know, they really enjoy getting out and talking to the customer and understanding what's going on. And they don't want to just be isolated in their little cubicle. So
Ed Kernick:You get first hand knowledge that way, instead of having a sort of, you can get a quantitative data maybe through a lot of these, these customer recording things, the customer omplaints, but to get the quali y data, maybe it's good to g talk to the customer to find o t really what's going on and sa ing we've done for will I ac ually get our customer sales rep or not, or the customer omplaint people to agree oth rs people's phone numbers, ometimes it will call back and aybe have meetings with them and try to figure out some of t e some of their problems.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah, no substitute for that. Let's see, let's talk about this UV lens disinfection case that you worked on. Especially, we're recording this during the whole COVID pandemic time. And I've seen quite a few UV disinfection phone cases pop up here and there. I've never used one but I think I have a general understanding of how they work. But yours what we're used for or are used for disinfecting, I guess contact lenses are are the cases that you helped develop for contact lenses? Are they basically the same as these cases that disinfect phones with UV light? And maybe talk a little bit about the physics behind that how is it that UV light will disinfect or kil the bugs that are on the surfa e of whatever's in the case?
Ed Kernick:Okay, well so and I'm a mechanical engineer but I spent two years on this project was actually my idea and so now I got two years of biology under my belt This is definitely not a biologist but I do understand how it kills slugs. So to get through, actually
Aaron Moncur:You can save the turtles now.
Ed Kernick:Yeah, so the what happened we were doing a lance a that like a bionic lens that could zoom in and I think Google's working on things like that. So we're working on something similar and we needed a way to charge it so my boss we create a case they can charge these lenses so I said well matter one I put UV light in there and disinfect the lens and the marketing group said we love it so go ahead and so we kicked off a whole new project on that. So but there's a lot of challenges. So and here's a lot of engineering came in so for example the when you we had to go through with many many mechanical designs, because UV light first of all UV light is a great for killing bugs. It takes the their DNA and actually or RNA, either one, and it takes it makes it where it can't replicate. It did the same but the same had the same thing happens to plastic. So contact lenses plastic so it takes the repeal the patio furniture out your dashboard and other cars in UV light will just break these uh these bonds so we that's why you find find the balance between mechanics if you put enough UV light duty to kill all the bugs but in viruses are easy to kill coronavirus would be very easy to kill this virus bu the you start getting the bact ria a little bit longer then you get the spores and the yeast mu h longer to kill because hey're they're being the spor s are encapsulated, so takes. S the challenge is now you got piece of plastic contact ens and a plastic case. And then you got to kill these spores b cause there's FDA requirem nt on certain bugs you have to ill
Aaron Moncur:Without damaging the lens, right?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, so that was the whole trick. So two years, a different designs, here's where it gets tricky. So to make sure you're just you get to design, it looks good, and you do some ray tracing and make sure the lights going where you want it. And all that. And it turns out now you'd have to grow up a million little bugs. So you want to kill spores, Canada, yeast cells, all this. And then you grow those, and then it takes maybe a week to grow those and then you have to, you kill them. And then you got to see how many they called colony forming units, you see how many grow back. So it's a two week process. So if you're trying to go through 100 designs a week or so make its process takes sequentially. So they, the microbots, myself came away, and we actually submitted for a patent and we wrote a paper, we got an article on it. And what we ended up doing is we killed down bugs, we do this once. But at the same time, we would put food coloring in in a vial it's in this is inside of the contact lens case. Have you ever seen a contact lens case?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah
Ed Kernick:Yeah, so we put the bugs in one and we put two coloring in the other? Well, the food coloring color degrades with UV light too. So we can measure the color. So we put the color in before and we put the color and after we looked how many bugs died. And we looked at the degradation in color. And then so now we created this little chart this little scale. So then I go through 100 designs, I just looked at the color and I could see how many potential bugs I would kill with each design
Aaron Moncur:Oh, that speeds up the process incredibly
Ed Kernick:Yes. And I was using like a little UV sticker that would change color. The problem is I need volumetric, it can't just be area. So the bugs are in a volume that the bacteria or spores or virus is that is floating around in this context, one solution. So you need to do the volume. And so that's what we did. So that was a neat invention. And we wrote a paper it was in microbiology methods of microbiology, and does a neat, neat solution.
Aaron Moncur:Pretty cool. So you had this volume of bugs that you wanted to kill. And then in the other area of the case, you have this food coloring, you zap it with UV light, and and you look at the degradation of the food coloring. And then that allows you to correlate degradation of food coloring with how many bugs die. So in the in future trials, you didn't need to grow the bugs. Is that, is that
Ed Kernick:Yes. So that we could go through 20 design iterations. Yeah, because we can 3D print these things and all that. And then we can optimize, okay, this had the best for the least amount of time turned to let you notice the it's a dose that kills the bugs also dose because plastic dose would be, i it an energy relative outputs energy, watts times power t mes times energy to the time cr ates a dose? So you want the sho test time to have the most ef ective kill? Right?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. And that's that's a huge deal, right? I mean, development is limited by testing. And if your test cycle takes two weeks, like you said, that's going to draw out the development cycle greatly. So at what point did you sit down and think, you know this is, this i taking too long, we got t figure out a different solutio to growing these bugs ar testing
Ed Kernick:And all my boss kept saying, Ed, man, you've been on this project for like a year, what's taking as long as I get takes forever so and I realized, well, developing test method was a huge hit. But it took a couple months to do, we first did these traditional things. And then we developed this test method about two then we were starting a really high throughput node, we call a high throughput screen. Now we can screen out all these designs in parallel, I can have 10 designs on a table and run t em and 3d print half the stuff and know within days that whi h one's best, and then we get do n to the final two or three cand dates. And then we starte with bugs again because just t verify
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, right, right. That's brilliant. Are you typically working on just one project at a time? Or is your time spread out across three or four different projects at any
Ed Kernick:That would be three or four typically.
Aaron Moncur:Okay
Ed Kernick:So right now probably, uh, probably 90% on one project and another 40% on another. Yeah, boy engineer day, right?
Aaron Moncur:Right, right.
Ed Kernick:Yeah. Week 40%. Do not wait 60 hours.
Aaron Moncur:Let's see. Okay, I've got one more question for you about some of your your direct experience at J&J, you worked on an electro active contact lens now I didn't even understand exactly what that means and electroactive contact lens can you share a little bit about what that is and what your role on the project was?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, so I was the lead engineer originally on that project. It was the lead mechanical engineer we had process engineers, chemical engineers. So that is a lens that you would put in your eye and we never got a fully to work but in theory, you would you could you could read sense of muscle of this called the ciliary muscle around the eye that use the focus. So for people everybody gets presbyopia in our life at some point or other if you live so presbyopia is a huge market. And neopia presbyopia is when your your lens quits working and you can't focus yet you can't focus in near so as you see all the way nowhere.
Aaron Moncur:I turned 40 last year and all of a sudden I have trouble seeing things close to me.
Ed Kernick:Yes, and it just gets worse and worse. So people got to get readers. So you can use a we have monofocal multifocal lenses you can wear or you get some people do the you could do a monofocal we put one lens in and out we're not what I'm doing right now one lens and I don't have the other one so but this device goal a couple goals but one was you could wear it and it could sense your muscle and it could zoom in and out so we never got that far but we had it were we working with fall where you could actually put the fog and zoom in good to fall but zoom out
Aaron Moncur:No way all with those little contact lens?
Ed Kernick:Yeah, yes, it's real challenge. We have custom chips made we were using that a a electroactive technology where it's sailing. And if you energize the st. lena will change your meniscus. So that's the zoom in and they have these lenses I think Edmunds Optics but we were developing around because the ones that ended up so pretty big. So this one we're making a little microscopic one and figure out so we're gonna go wow, and then we were working on like biosensors and all these electronics in your eyes. So it's a fun project. But that budgets got tight and that project got a shelf for a while so
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's one of those like next generation space age type projects you don't hear about those ve y often. So thank you for shar ng about that. That's very coo. What, what are some of the c allenges that you run into on daily basis or not even nec ssarily on a daily basis, b t what are some of the main cha lenges that you face?
Ed Kernick:Challenges or budget and schedules typically and then those are these the the non fun challenges the fun or not fun challenges also the engineering challenges, right to make things work right now working on a vision system and machine learning. And when you making billions of lenses a year, you want to you, don't want to throw away money. So I want to get these a very accurate vision system for detecting things detecting defects, but I also want to have one it doesn't throw any product. So really, get these things with these these false rejects down to like on the zero is very, very challenging. But yeah, typical in any industry job as you get paid for is finding thirds easy problem, they would need engineer so
Aaron Moncur:Right, right. I'm going to ask the question in a slightly different way. If you had a magic wand and could wave this wand and change one or two things about how you work or the environment what, what would that be?
Ed Kernick:If I could change the environment, I probably, like most engineers, I don't if if I had someone to do all the paperwork. And it'll be good.
Aaron Moncur:Documentation? I saw that one coming.
Ed Kernick:Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that was the, I know in one of your questions you wrote down, things that would a major successes and failures and lessons learned. Yeah. Documentation was one of the lessons learned.
Aaron Moncur:How so like, did you learn to enjoy it or how was it less
Ed Kernick:I didn't learn to enjoy I learned that the works not done to the paperwork. It's not done, I guess was saying around it. But the I thought for a while, and it probably hurt my career for a short period of time that I just want to do fun stuff on design, make drawings and make parts and but once I started being writing technical reports, and documented things better. I started, I was more well rounded, and it's the stuff I hated to do. But as I did that stuff better, my career advanced along with it. Because you're more well rounded, even though it's not the fun stuff, it is a it's unnecessary stuff.
Aaron Moncur:What would Ed, what would engineer Ed, today, say to engineer Ed 25 years ago that you wish you had known back then?
Ed Kernick:Oh well, documentation would be one. If, back then if I realized, I know, one of my managers ctually on the R&D said, 'Ma, if you, you look in the mirro, find out what's holding y u back, you're great, great eng neer, but there's, there's s me things that everybody can work on something. And that' something I avoided and avoid d. But once I got that, it eally, I think, open doors as ust more well rounded person. S I think if I would have star ed that earlier, that would be hat would have been beneficia to my career. Another thing is aking data based decisions earlier on to thinking some of t ese blackbelt statistic class have really been bene icial to my career, because I can use the data, present d ta and make very database ecisions, I think is a and prese t they think a lot of people go on with emotions, and it's real y nice to have the data. And you can really make better de isions with obviously,
Aaron Moncur:what what class was that that you took, what was it like a Six Sigma thing or something else?
Ed Kernick:Yes, Six Sigma. There's a Shannon Shane in red X, which is real, a lot of people like that a lot. But I used the, the Six Sigma fairly often, in my career. And I use that a lot with scientific method, he can write reports, because that's really define your problem. Make sure you got a good measurement system so you can measure where the problems and make triq made an improvement analyze the data in federal process. So that's a sort of live my, my life using that now every time I approach a new project, or write a report, same format
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. Love it. All right. Well, Ed, we're wrapping up here. Before we end, is there anything else that that you'd like to share? Anything that maybe I just haven't touched on? Or anything comes to mind for you?
Ed Kernick:No, no, I appreciate you. Let me come on a ramble about myself.
Aaron Moncur:I love it. I love I love hearing engineers ramble. I just think engineers are really interesting people. And it's always fun to hear about how other people do things and how other other people solve problems. Well, before I let you go
Ed Kernick:I did have one thing. I think you, go ahead, what were you saying?
Aaron Moncur:How can people get a hold of you if they want to reach out?
Ed Kernick:Okay. E Kernick, ekernick@gmail.com. You could get a hold of me just go ahead and shoot me an email. But uh, maybe the subject mentioned this and mentioned something because, obviously, if it gets a lot of spam, so yeah, just make it do something, catch my eye.
Aaron Moncur:Being An Engineer Podcast question there.
Ed Kernick:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think one of the questions I thought it also you just said, oh, there was something I guess the few have said been useful to me. I think I was just gonna mention before we go is just obviously.
Aaron Moncur:Oh yeah, please
Ed Kernick:Think I wrote these down. Because I think, looking b ck on my career just goes back to your previous question. I, things that have made me I m not saying I'm super successfu, but things that have been engi eering fellow Johnson Johnson. o I think that things that have made me successful have, alw ys think outside the box, and, and have intellectual curiosity right, when you have passion f r your job, and find out why t ings work and why things ar so when you have these con ersations with people about pro lems, you understand a lot about it, and then I think the last hing would be always challenge the status quo. But have, if e've always done something this way, and I got five guys on here, machine where he's done something this way, but I can do it this way. And I can save s much money, build a business ase, have the day that's ch llenged status quo, just have to embrace in your hands. Bu I think that's very important to make to have progress s to always really want to i novate, and do better. And when omeone says, 'Well, we've don it that way, and it's fine.' Sa, 'Well, I got data to show ther's a better way to do.' So
Aaron Moncur:I love that. That, to me, sounds a lot like continually asking why, why, why and you get to a kind of a root cause. You also mentioned, the importance of creative thinking or thinking outside of the box. I wonder, do you have any tactics or tools that you can share? Like, if I'm a young engineer, I probably heard that I should be creative or think outside the box. But how do I do that before I have a lot of experience? Do you have any any thoughts on that?
Ed Kernick:Well, I think you don't, don't always look at first of all, when someone says we tried that 20 years ago, it's not gonna work. Well, there's a couple things. There's new technologies and trying that may have been something so they may have tried something totally different. So you may want to always challenge these, these tribal knowledges, that may not be even the same problem. So look here, look at your output, what is your desired output? And how do you want to get there? And if we got all these constraints, are they real constraints? Are they tangible, strange are these, these this box that you're thinking outside of may not even be a box, right? So it really just try to find your end goal? And don't you get to sort of ignore some of these other things, and start to figure out a way to do it, and then try to put it back together and see how it would fit in that box? Or is there a box, so you always want to maybe start at the, at the problem, and not really go after these these things that we've always done it that way? You say, Well, there's, yeah, look at, look at the best ways to do things and brainstorm.'
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I love that you highlighted defining the boundaries, right? Because the boundaries that we're given for problem might not really be the boundaries, right? Someone, somewhere may have come up with these boundaries, these project requirements and pass them down the chain, and we get them. And we have the tendency to look at them as gospel and say, 'Okay, these are the requirements we have to be within this box.' But oftentimes, if you question those, well, why does it have to be this temperature specifically? Why does it have to be that material specifically? Oftentimes, you ask these questions and whoever handed those requirements down are like, well, I don't know I saw someone else do it that way,
Ed Kernick:Exactly. Yeah, so and if you know enough about it, so that's what I'm gonna do, so learn your process, when you ake these black belts, Six Sigma classes, walk the process l arning process, no matter wh t it is, whether you're ma ing refrigerators, or contact l nses or instruments, right so now the process and say, wow, really, that temperatu e really is not that's that was eel like you said someone j st sort of made it up. But that eally is not where what's ne ded here. So you can and that, and they give you some leeway. A d also now you got it. Kim was t e other thing, keep it simple. S you may have design around a unch of these requireme ts, you may be able to make thin s a lot more simple, and have uch better success. If you don't have as many requireme ts.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's a great tactic, define, understand the boundaries, and then question them why why is this boundary really a boundary? One, one that I'll share, is I really like making lists, I've just I've always been a list maker, I think part of it is because I don't have a great memory, I just, I can't recall things that well, so I write them down so I can reference the list later. But in terms of brainstorm, it's been really helpful for me, as opposed to typing a list I find that using my hand with, okay, I don't use a pencil and paper I use an apple pen and a tablet, but I'm using my hand to actual y write these out. And when I'm rainstorming like that, the first five or six or seven or 0 ideas are usually kind of t e obvious ones, but I find that the ones that are really cr ative tend to be idea number 1 idea number 19 idea number 20 i's once you get past that first dozen or so that the really kin of creative out of the box idea start to start flying at lea t that's what I found for me personally.
Ed Kernick:No, I agree. And then you write them down you can see him too and then you can if you just start if you just brainstorming room and then you don't write all the stuff down he loses all that knowledge. So I think we definitely write it down and and then you can elaborate and break it down even into pieces and figure out the what are your boundarie? Your true boundarie?
Aaron Moncur:Exactly, exactly. All right, that's gonna good and part of the title for this podcast define the boundaries.
Ed Kernick:Yeah, I like it.
Aaron Moncur:All right. Well, Ed, thank you so much for your time. I know you're a busy guy. I really appreciate you take this time out to sit down and just to talk with me share some of your wisdom and and your background. So this has been excellent. Thank you very much.
Ed Kernick:Appreciate it. Nice to meet you. And thanks for having me on.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, Founder of Pipeline Design & Engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a positive review. It really helps other people find the show. To learn how your engineering team can leverage our team's expertise in developing turnkey custom test fixtures, automated equipment and product design, visit us at testfixturedesign.com. Thanks for listening.