A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRIMS NESS

John H. Merrill, an MBA (Stanford, '73) with a background in marketing with major U.S. corporations, had a management consulting assignment in 1989 that introduced him to the drinking water filtration business. Merrill discovered that even the best filtration systems were vulnerable to a serious shortcoming -- the contaminants they purport to remove eventually saturate the filter and break through into the user's water flow. There was no safeguard mechanism to alert the consumer. To remedy that, Merrill set out to develop an ion-detecting monitor that would detect break-through of the ion exchange resins, the filtration media used for removing heavy metals, arsenic and nitrates in a filter. By 1995, with help from an Army Corps of Engineer's lab, Cold Regions Research Engineering Labs (CRREL) in Hanover, NH and at the University of New Hampshire, Merrill had the beginnings of a workable electrochemical mechanism that had promise for solving the problem. In 1997, Merrill located at the Center for Environmental Enterprise, a small business incubator in South Portland, Maine. He filed his first patent application on December 2, 1997. The following year the company received its first research grant from the National Science Foundation.

The first QCM sensor

BNC's first sensor employing a quartz crystal microbalance was fabricated at Case Western in Cleveland, with that NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant project completed by June of 1999. Although the company had an interesting laboratory device, it was still a long way from a product. The next steps were to bring technical people in-house and expand BNC's collaborative relationships.

Advancing the technology

In 1999, BNC was awarded its second and third federal research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), funding sensor technology collaborations, primarily with Sandia Labs, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Oklahoma State University. BNC has received further R&D funding from private investors, the Maine Technology Institute and the National Environmental Technology Institute in Massachusetts. Brims Ness Corporation was formed as a C-corporation in November 1998. With that support, Brims Ness began putting together its in-house research and development team.

Brims Ness now has twelve employees, with a majority of them being the engineers and scientists that have transformed collaborative research projects into market-ready high-tech products.

The advent of the Brims Ness monitors represents a paradigm shift in the water industry. They will automate the monitoring process, eliminating the danger of undetected contamination spikes. Additionally, they will effect cost reductions the magnitude of which will compel many fundamental changes in existing processes and increase the standards of purity to which water processes are held.

Brims Ness - Millinocket

The Brims Ness general offices and production recently are in Millinocket, ME. Millinocket is in the middle of Maine geographically and is an hour’s drive north of Bangor. BNC located in Millinocket for three reasons. Most local paper industry operations have shut down leaving a large capable labor force ready to work. The 79,000 sq ft building that was once Great Northern Paper’s Engineering & Research building became available at very attractive leasing arrangements. (When it was built in the 1960s, it was regarded as the paper industry’s finest R&D facility in the world.) Millinocket is 45 minutes away from the top research university in the state at Orono. Finally, this is a land of lakes, rivers, mountains and moose where people don’t bother to lock their car doors and the teenagers are polite. It’s an extraordinary place.
Brims Ness’ production chemistry lab facility located on the second floor includes three fume hoods and quality storage and work areas. A climate-controlled room on the first floor houses the first six of 18 simulators we are fabricating and installing. BNC’s production area will be on the top floor of the wing (at 2 o’clock in the photo).