The company says that its Adaptive Focused Acoustics (AFA) process works by sending acoustic energy wave packets from a dish-shaped transducer that converges and focuses to a localized point.
Functioning in the range 500-1000 kHz, the technology is said to be operable in virtually any tube or plate format in both non contact and isothermal mode and volume ranges.
From the focus point, the energy density may be controlled, essentially allowing mechanical energy to be applied to a compound or other material without directly compacting it.
Through this acoustic transfer of energy the compound undergoes compression and rarefication that can be controlled to produce the exact compound consistency required for the formulation application.
To date the technology has been successfully applied to pharmaceutical applications, mainly in the North American and European markets. It has been applied to aid drug metabolism, as well as tablet disruption for quality control monitoring of active pharmaceutical ingredients.
The company says that, in much the same way as it is has been applied to these areas in the pharmaceutical industry, it can also be applied to the cosmetics industry, where the use of increasingly complex ingredients is more and more common.
Jon Curtis, from KBiosciences, the UK company that is distributing the technology in Europe, says that through research work on kidney stones, Covaris came to realize that the technology would have applications for pharmaceutical formulations, and, as a natural progress, that this can also be applied to cosmetics formulation.
Primary focuses for the technology are expected to be complex cosmetic formulations such as anti-aging products, where high levels of active ingredients, and increasingly nano-based ingredients are used.