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Assembly Line
Meet The Startup That Designed CT Scanners To Make Consumer Products Better
What if industrial designers could see inside a bicycle or a running shoe with the same precision that doctors can image their patients’ internal organs? That’s the basic idea behind Cambridge, Mass.-based Lumafield, which designed a new type of CT scanner that gives engineers the ability to peer inside their products to identify leaky seals or create longer-lasting designs.
Lumafield isn’t the first company to design computed tomography scanners that could be used by engineers and product designers. But traditional industrial scanners from companies like Zeiss and Nikon were complex and expensive instruments, costing upwards of $1 million, making them best for high-end use cases like aerospace. Lumafield’s Neptune scanner, by contrast, is available for less than $3,000 a month. That allows the scanning technology to be available to consumer products companies, which previously relied on cutting items open with a band saw and putting pieces under the microscope to look for quality issues.