Technology sectors we have assisted

R&D technology projects completed recently:

A Boston horticultural company to develop a fully automatic planting machine, capable of inserting immature plants into the soil, 5 rows at a time, at an average speed of 3.2 plants per second per row. The main new technology involved very robust high speed pick and place robotics, location sensors and digital control for a working field environment. As well as high-speed the main issues were significant reliability and low maintenance costs.

A Solihull company on research for the manufacture of multilayer laminate coextrusions, including encapsulating materials between layers. This involved research on material compatibility and process technology for simultaneously extruding up to 6 laminate layers at the same time.

A Derby software company in the development of specialist computers, interface connectors and diagnostic software to allow the monitoring brain function in ambulant patients, and the prediction of seizures before these occur.

R&D technology project completed in the last few months:

A Lincoln company in the design and manufacture of power devices and digital components for high-speed telecommunications. The project was to research high efficiency DC power to RF (radio frequency) conversion using micro cavities to produce standing wave RF.

A Loughborough company in the development of a computerised system to investigate conditions in modified or newly designed chemical process plant, and then be able to identify all potential hazard conditions. This software development was unique as the process had been manual until this time, and used very experienced highly skilled expensive personnel. The software had to interface and interrogate Chemical Process Plant computer-aided design (CAD) systems from Intergraph and Aspen Zyquad, who held 80% of the international market.

This successful software project developed a product capable of automatically analysing outputs from a chemical plant flow diagram and identifying hazard conditions. The process reduced the time and expense of a highly skilled manual procedure to a quarter of the traditional method.