Company History

Mohr and Associates was founded in 1982 by Dr. Charles and Linda Mohr. Dr. Mohr, former Senior Staff Scientist at Battelle / Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), invented the first two-phase flow measurement system designed to accurately determine the local void fraction and total liquid coolant inventory within boiling water (BWR) and pressurized water (PWR) nuclear reactors, even under boiling or frothing conditions in which no true gas/liquid interface exists. Such a system can significantly improve both BWR and PWR heat transfer thermal efficiency and is essential in preventing a PWR loss-of-coolant failure such as the Three Mile Island incident.

In 1985, as part of an early iteration of this thermal hydraulics sensor system, Mohr and Associates contracted Tektronix® to design and build a specialized 3-channel high-resolution digital Time-Domain Reflectometer (TDR). Modified single-channel versions of that design were subsequently commercialized by Tektronix® as the Tektronix® 1502B, the first digital TDR, and later as the Tektronix® 1502C. Mohr and Associates went on to make significant advances in related time-domain electronics, signal processing software, and probe technology, resulting in multiple U.S. and foreign patents and eventually leading to the current line of EFP Series guided ultra-wideband radar liquid level, void fraction, moisture, and mixture sensors.

The CT100 Series Automated Metallic TDR Cable Tester family represents a separate design effort but benefits from elements of the EFP Series' precision ultra-wideband technology. The CT100 TDR is in use by multiple U.S. national labs, numerous aerospace and defense technology companies, and has been selected by the U.S. Navy for its General Purpose Electronic Test Equipment (GPETE) program. The CT100 will be used to support a variety of Navy and Marine Corps applications, replacing the functionality of the discontinued Tektronix(R) 1502C high-resolution TDR.

During the early 1990's, Mohr and Associates began to gather talented nuclear engineering, criticality safety, and health physics experts from the Hanford area and developed a successful nuclear criticality safety consulting business. This team has been involved at a fundamental level in the design of multiple nuclear waste remediation facilities and has branched out into the design and development of specialized nuclear instrumentation for the assay of radiological waste and nuclear fissile contraband materials.

In the late 1990's, the CEO of a major Washington State fruit-packing cooperative contacted Mohr and Associates about the need for an accurate, repeatable way of measuring fruit maturity to improve industry-wide fruit quality and competitiveness with emerging foreign agricultural markets. This led to the development of the Mohr Digi-Test (MDT) line of fruit penetrometers and texture analyzers, the first and only instruments to accurately characterize the internal structural maturity of apples and other tree fruit. The incorporation of this technology into the barcode-driven relational database model designed into the MDT Server software stands to revolutionize QA/QC within the tree fruit industry. The MDT-1 is in use by both industry and academia. The MDT-2 is an enhanced version of the instrument family due for release in Spring 2010.

Our home office is in Richland, WA, a town near the famous Hanford reservation that was one of the original boomtowns of the Manhattan Project of WWII. Richland has extensive local scientific and engineering resources, including the Hanford nuclear reservation, dozens of related companies, and prominent national research laboratories. Richland is also situated along the Columbia River, near hundreds of thousands of acres of tree fruit orchards driven by the plentiful irrigation.