Case Studies

Natural gas power plants burn fuel to turn turbines, which generates electricity. The burning creates high temperatures and high speed particles which collide with turbine blades, eroding surfaces and reducing efficiency. Lost performance, forced outages and repairs caused by erosion costs the power industry around 200 million ...

Gas fired power plants use burning gases to drive turbines and create electricity. The efficiency of converting the heat and speed of gas streams into turbine blade motion determines how much energy is produced per ton of gas burnt. Hot gas streams pick up particles and corrosion scales from interior surfaces of combustion cham...

Modern cars must be manufactured with great precision to ensure they meet design specification. Grooves in the pistons or ripples on body surfaces affect the car’s performance and appearance. Most engineering industries face similar issues, as ever greater accuracy is required to produce more precisely engineered parts. Co-ord...

The electronics industry aims to develop ever smaller, more powerful and efficient devices, and is keen to use new organic materials alongside conventional components. Existing measurement methods – designed for silicon based electronics – are unsuitable for these organic materials. Therefore, in order to accurately specify the...

To analyse and assess ocean colour requires satellite measurements sensitive enough to distinguish small changes in the little light reflected by the ocean from the brighter background light reflected by the atmosphere. Radiometers, the instruments that measure ocean colour, are calibrated pre-launch, but due to demanding accur...

Introducing innovative products such as novel optoelectronics based on quantum dots, nanowires and nanorods or wear resistant coating using new nanostructures relies on having confidence in how these materials behave at the nano-scale. Understanding the strength of materials at the nano-scale as opposed to in bulk is essential...