Frontier IP Group (LON:FIPP), the capital efficient IP commercialisation company, has announced that it has taken a 24% stake in Cambridge Material Testing Solutions, a business established to support the work of Dr James Dean, a scientist with a PhD from the Department of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge. The company is developing hardware and software to measure material characteristics in critical metal components more swiftly, cost effectively, and accurately than other systems. Among other potential benefits is mobile and remote testing on site, and the ability to assess complex components and joints.
The technology has a very wide range of applications in several sectors, including in the aerospace, nuclear, and oil and gas industries where material degradation and component life assessment of high value assets is critically important.
Currently, the hardware used to measure material characteristics forces a hard tip into a metal surface to create an indent. The material response characteristics are measured, allowing simple measurements of hardness and stiffness to be made. Existing indentation test equipment is bulky and laboratory based.
Cenkos Comment: Taking another stake in a company with potentially ground-breaking technology is clearly another positive step forward for Frontier IP Group
Cambridge Materials Testing Solutions has clearly identified an opportunity and a solution for the materials testing space which is far more efficient, user friendly and cost effective than current solutions. The suite of software packages, called SEMPID (Software for the Extraction of Material Properties from Indentation Data), are application specific tools for converting indentation data into mechanical material parameters and stress-strain curves and an application is already available in beta version. This relatively advanced nature of the company at the point of announcement is testament to the Frontier IP business model where IP like this is advanced as far as possible with as little capital at risk without detrimental effect to the rate of commercialisation.
