Frontier IP Group Plc (LON:FIPP), which specialises in commercialising university intellectual property, today announced that it has taken a 24 per cent stake in Cambridge Material Testing Solutions, a business established to support the work of Dr James Dean, an expert in the mechanics and deformation of materials.
The Company is developing software and hardware 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.
Cambridge Material Testing Solutions is addressing the materials testing challenges facing industry by focusing on two development areas:
- a suite of software tools, called SEMPID. This can process data generated by existing indentation test equipment and swiftly convert it into information easily understood by engineers to assess the strength and remaining working life of metal components;
- customised indentation test equipment. The new systems will be desktop-based, mobile, or fixed on site to assess critical components while in service.
Dr James Dean received his PhD from the Department of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge. He has worked for Frazer Nash Consultancy, a leading systems and engineering technology company, on a number of projects, mainly in the nuclear and aerospace industries. He then joined Double Precision Consultancy, a specialist in tackling complex engineering challenges.
More details about the technology are below.
Frontier IP Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Neil Crabb said: “Frontier IP is delighted to be working with Dr. James Dean and his team to help accelerate the commercialisation of this exciting technology. We believe Cambridge Material Testing Solutions could prove invaluable to companies in critical sectors which need to ensure the materials they use are safe and robust.”
Cambridge Material Testing Solutions’ Chief Technology Officer, Dr. James Dean said: “Our partnership with Frontier IP is further confirmation of our proposition’s value. With Frontier IP’s expertise in the commercialisation of advanced technologies and its ready access to the sectors we intend to penetrate, where the accurate and non-destructive characterisation of material properties is crucial to the safe operation of high value assets.”
About the Cambridge Materials Testing Solutions technology:
The Company is initially developing a suite of user-friendly software packages that allow rapid and accurate evaluation of the parameters that characterise mechanical properties (such as yield stress and work hardening rate) from instrumented indentation tests. These non-destructive tests are quick and easy to carry out.
Another major attraction is that such experiments require only small samples of simple shape (such as plates of mm dimensions), while mapping of local properties over the surface of larger samples is also possible.
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.
An application for the calculation of stress-strain curves (plasticity parameters) is already available in beta version. This application can process data generated during an indentation test (load-displacement curves or residual indent shapes) and swiftly convert it into stress-strain data that can subsequently be used to assess the strength and remaining working life of metal components.
Their software solutions can significantly reduce materials testing turnaround times and materials testing costs.
In addition, and as part of their proposed portfolio of materials testing solutions, the Company is developing a customised suite of indentation test equipment including a bespoke desktop-based indenter, and a portable indenter for remote testing of in-service and on-site components.
