Since 1987
About New Logic
New Logic started the way a lot of good engineering stories do: in a small space, with a few stubborn people who could not leave a hard problem alone.
How New Logic Started
In 1987, in the San Francisco Bay Area, two entrepreneurs, Dr. Brad Culkin and Ric Johnson, set out to build a technology company.
The idea of turning a garage project into a real business was already part of local culture. But their focus was not computers. It was liquids.
Brad brought a PhD in chemical engineering and a head full of ideas for how separation could work. Ric brought the business sense to turn those ideas into something that could leave the lab and survive in the real world.
They experimented with a range of inventions and licensing deals. One technology gradually pushed the rest out of the way.
It began as something very small and precise, a vision for a better blood separator. Then the question shifted:
“If this works at a drop scale, could it work at the plant scale?”
That question became the seed of VSEP® – Vibratory Shear Enhanced Processing.
The early New Logic years were not smooth or linear. There were licensing deals that went somewhere and others that did not. There were inventions that showed promise and then hit dead ends.
VSEP was different. It had real physics behind it and a clear problem to attack: how to keep membranes running on liquids that do not behave nicely.
Brad focused on the technology. Ric kept the business alive long enough for the idea to prove itself. Both of them were motivated less by hype and more by the satisfaction of building something that actually worked in the field.
From the beginning, the aim wasn’t to chase quick exits or buzzwords. It was to build a tool that helped industry clean up after itself in a practical, defensible way.
From One Drop to Millions of Gallons
Scaling VSEP was not a simple step up in size. Going from microliters in a lab to millions of gallons in an industrial environment meant rethinking almost everything around the original mechanism.
Brad and Ric decided not to keep it small. They chose to scale.
To do that, they needed someone who knew how to make things stand up in the real world. They turned to Ric’s brother, Greg Johnson. Greg had studied chemical engineering, then built a successful career in construction, delivering commercial and residential projects.
It took some persuasion to pull him away from a stable business into an unproven technology. Once he committed, he became the driving force behind commercializing VSEP.
The three of them brought together lab thinking, business judgment, and practical build experience. That mix shaped how New Logic still works today: ideas are tested hard, built carefully, and deployed where they can actually help.
Finding the First Real Uses
The first applications for VSEP were not glamorous. They were very real: dewatering kaolin clay, titanium dioxide, calcium carbonate, and other industrial slurries.
These were places where liquids carried both value and headaches. Early VSEP units proved they could pull water out, concentrate product, and keep running in environments that were not kind to conventional equipment.
Those first wins turned VSEP from a clever concept into something plants could trust. Word spread. The technology began to appear in more processes and more countries, one tough stream at a time.
Growing With the Membrane World
As New Logic grew, the membrane world around it changed.
At first, VSEP was mostly paired with microfiltration and ultrafiltration membranes and used as a dewatering tool. Then newer, more robust nanofiltration and reverse osmosis membranes arrived.
Combined with VSEP’s open channel filter pack design, that meant a single piece of equipment could separate both suspended and dissolved solids. Applications that had been out of reach for membranes were suddenly on the table.
Plants also needed more than a single machine. They needed full systems they could integrate. New Logic responded by adding fully automated separation systems, spiral-wound RO units where they made sense, membrane performance chemicals, and other supporting tools that made the technology easier to adopt and live with.
Over time, the company grew into a global footprint, with systems operating on six continents.
What Has Not Changed
Despite that growth, some things have stayed very consistent.
New Logic is still led by people who think like engineers and builders. There is a strong bias toward physics, testing, and telling the truth about what a system will and will not do.
There is also a simple, grounded view of responsibility. The goal is not to join every trend or attach the company’s name to whatever is fashionable. It is to help industrial plants clean up after themselves in a way that is practical and defensible.
That does not mean slogans. It means designing technology that helps plants:
- Use water wisely.
- Handle difficult streams instead of pushing the problem somewhere else.
- Leave sites and communities better than they would be without that effort.
The founder’s mindset still shows up clearly in the current leadership. New Logic is not being built to flip. It is being built to matter over time.
The Spirit of New Logic Today
Today, New Logic is much larger than the original garage team, but the internal compass is the same:
- Curiosity about hard separation problems.
- Respect for the people who run plants day and night.
- A preference for meaningful, long-term work over quick wins.
Greg and the team come to work to build technology that earns its place in demanding environments and makes it easier for industry to do the right thing with its water and waste.
That is the story so far. The rest is the ongoing work of applying VSEP wherever it can help, one difficult stream at a time.
