Applied Separations, Inc.
Applied Separations was one of the early participants in Pennsylvania's Ben Franklin Technology Partnership, located on the Lehigh University campus, an incubator program for high technology start-up companies. The company secured research grants to develop manufacturing methods to produce consistently high quality Solid Phase Extraction (SPE) chromatography sorbents. The line of consumable SPE cartridges was marketed under the trade name Spe-ed - solid phase extraction and elution device.
In 1992, Applied Separations entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a low-cost supercritical fluid extraction instrument that overcomes many of the shortcomings of the instruments currently in the marketplace. The culmination of this effort, two years later, was the Spe-ed SFE. Two of the foremost experts in supercritical fluid extraction, Dr. Jerry King and Dr. Robert Maxwell, have lent their names to the Spe-ed SFE project. Market acceptance of the Spe-ed SFE was overwhelming.
The SFE endeavor has been expanded with new models to meet the specific needs of various markets, e.g. food, natural products. Due to customer demand, in 1996 the company began to engineer larger-scale SFE systems for process manufacturing.