Technical Skills & Experience

Our team of physicists and engineers have extensive experience of industrial R&D work, particularly in our core competency area of industrial applications of Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) but also in other related areas:

 

Engineering design & component machining
Our engineering team includes time-served toolmakers / machinists and professional mechanical design engineers.  This resource allows us to efficiently take an idea from concept through to prototype design and on to component machining using our in-house precision engineering machineshop facilities.  The design of our LIBS products are under constant review so that we can make improvements to existing designs as and when necessary, and introduce new products should there be a need.  In addition to maintaining an in-house manufacturing capability for our LIBS products, our engineering design and component machining resources allow us to undertake other work for our customers, including contract R&D, custom-designed equipment manufacture and component machining to customer supplied drawings.

 

 

Two of our staff are trained and experienced in a wide range of nuclear industry activities having worked previously for many years at BNFL's nuclear complex at Sellafield, UK. In addition to having the necessary security clearance for unescorted access to various nuclear licensed sites, they are trained in areas such as radiological safety, the use of active laboratories and alpha gloveboxes, working in C2 and C3 (respirator) areas and AGR in-vessel C3/R4 work requiring the use of air-fed "Hot" suits.  Experience gained to date includes nuclear fuel manufacture, nuclear power plant outage work (Magnox and AGR, including in-vessel work), spent fuel reprocessing, plutonium processing plants, high-level waste plants and decommissioning of redundant nuclear facilities such as alpha plants, hot-cells and fuel storage ponds.

 

Software development
Our software engineers are proficient in the development of system control software using the graphical programming language LabVIEW™.  We have developed our LIBSoft 2020 application to facilitate control all aspects of our range of modular LIBS instruments including hardware configuration data acquisition and specialist analyis functions.

 

We have also developed application-specific software for some of our special LIBS instruments including integration with plant control systems.