A custom LIMS unifying ten materials-characterization techniques for DOE
Building a custom LIMS for a venture-backed materials startup — parameterizing the KPIs from ten-plus characterization techniques into one .NET / SQL Server system with a distributed desktop client, for streamlined design-of-experiments analysis, delivered in six months.
Customer
A venture-backed startup developing novel nanomaterials, characterizing them across a wide array of instruments and needing a single data system to drive its experimental program.
Challenge
The startup measured its materials with a broad set of techniques — each instrument producing its own data, in its own format, with its own notion of what mattered. Designing and analyzing design-of-experiments (DOE) studies across them meant pulling KPIs out of scattered, per-instrument files by hand. To move at startup speed, the team needed one system that captured the meaningful parameters from every technique and made them queryable together:
- Hall-effect measurements
- Z-scan (optical nonlinearity)
- FTIR
- Optical absorption
- Resistivity
- BET (surface area)
- I–V measurement
- Quantum efficiency
- SEM imaging
- Raman (amorphous vs. crystalline character)
Solution
We built a custom Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) from the ground up, designed around the lab's instruments and its DOE workflow.
- Parameterized the KPIs for every technique above into a common, queryable schema, so results from very different instruments line up against consistent parameters.
- .NET backend with a distributed desktop client — deliberately not a web application — suited to the lab environment and the way the team works at the bench.
- SQL Server as the system of record, structured so experiments can be designed and analyzed against consistent KPIs across instruments and runs.
- Delivered the whole system in six months, working in close collaboration with the startup's DBA.
The result was a single source of truth for the startup's materials data: parameterized KPIs from ten-plus characterization techniques, captured in one place and queryable for DOE — replacing scattered per-instrument files and letting the team design and analyze experiments against consistent measurements.