Help at hand to test new products
The University of Warwick has recently launched an initiative that allows the Scientific instruments and academic expertise available within the University to be most easily accessed and applied to the types of challenges facing industry wishing to develop innovative products.
We’ve all experienced it. You’ve finally got that new wonder product home, the one that’ll solve all your problems. You plug it in, turn it on, and ‘bang’, something immediately breaks.
No products are specifically designed to suffer this type of catastrophic short-term failure, but as ever complex technology finds its way into more daily domestic items and products, the risk of failure – of components incorrectly designed or incorrectly applied for an application – always increases.
It need not be this way however! That was very much a manufacturing-related example but similar things can and do occur in any field, sector, or technology where a process has to be tracked, a widget manufactured to a specification, an output delivered, in ensuring at all stages what you expect to get is indeed what you have – and if you can’t get it to work as you expect, to find out why not.
A common example of this process that is regularly ‘embedded’ in society are aircraft crash investigation organisations. Here, clearly, there is a public safety imperative to ensure the accident cause is well understood and whatever changes to materials, manufacture, organisation or operation are required to minimize future occurrences are taken – for example, remember Concorde or the VC10.
An entire industry now exists, that of scientific analysis, measurement and metrology, supported by a diverse range of measurement instruments that are capable of measuring almost anything from the scale of an atom upwards. Correctly applied, such technologies are an enabler of innovation, ensuring understanding of what is really happening with your products and processes, in their creation, their maintenance, or when they may fail.
UniversityofWarwickhas recently launched an initiative that allows the scientific instruments and academic expertise available within the University to be most easily accessed and applied to the types of challenges facing industry wishing to develop innovative products – the types of industry found within theSciencePark
If any business would like further information on Warwick Scientific Services and how it may help their business, please see www.warwick.ac.uk/wss or contact Dr Mark Barnett, Head of Warwick Scientific Services, on m.a.barnett@warwick.ac.uk or 024 7615 0577.
