Case Studies

The EU accounts for around 15 % of the world’s international trade in goods. Purchases are heavily influenced by conscious and subconscious visual cues which we relate as ‘quality’ in a product. A poor finish on a car, for example, may cause paint to develop an ‘orange peel’ look, eliciting a negative response in a buyer. This ...

Conventionally, most electronic items in Europe operated at 50 Hz, matching the frequency of the domestic power supply. Recently, devices operating at higher frequencies have become prevalent in applications such as wireless power transfer, power converters for photovoltaics, and in industrial applications such as induction hea...

Many high-end industrial production processes, including semiconductor and solar cell manufacturing, utilise high (10-1-10-5 Pa) and ultra-high (10-5-10-10 Pa) vacuums. Instrumentation used in these areas, such as residual gas analysers and quadrupole mass spectrometers, require accurate calibration with ionisation gauges (IG)....

Nanoparticles – materials for which at least half the constituent particles are smaller than 100 nanometres – exhibit unusual physical and chemical properties. At such scales the influences of surface atoms can dominate, producing characteristics exploitable in healthcare, including for cancer treatments. A promising drug deli...

Graphene is a lattice of carbon only one atom thick. Despite being effectively two-dimensional (2D) it is the strongest material ever discovered with a tensile strength over 200 times stronger than structural steel. It also has the lowest room-temperature electrical resistivity of any known material and its high electron mobili...

For optimal efficiency and product quality, high-value manufacturing processes are required to operate at very specific temperatures. Turbine blade heat-treatment, for example, is performed at temperatures above 1300 °C and held within narrow tolerances and temperature ranges, requiring furnaces to be controlled by several prec...