Process engineering
Solutions
Sometimes the answer is a machine. More often it is a change to the one you already own — a baffle, a recipe, a thermocouple in a different place, or a compliance route nobody has walked you through.
Unmatched uniformity
If the load shadows itself, nothing downstream fixes it.
Uniformity is decided by airflow around a loaded charge, not an empty vessel. We model the circulation with your actual tooling in place, then tune the plenum, flow straighteners and H-slot baffles until the coldest point in the charge meets specification.
Where a machine will not hold uniformity with a new tool, the model usually shows why — and which baffle change fixes it — before anyone books a shutdown.
- CFD of the loaded vessel, not the empty one
- Survey to AMS2750 with a documented, traceable result
- On-site baffle tuning once the real tooling arrives
- Thermocouple placement reviewed against the actual charge
Measurable savings
The fastest return is usually the cycle you already run
Cure cycles are often inherited, conservative and never revisited. Shortening a dwell by twenty minutes on a machine running five cycles a week is a capacity increase that costs nothing in capital.
01
Cycle optimisation
We instrument a real cure, find where the load is waiting on the slowest part, and establish how much of the dwell is genuinely required by the resin system rather than by habit.
02
Energy recovery
Heat recovery between vessels, modulating cooling and insulation review. On high-duty-cycle plant the payback is frequently inside two years.
03
Throughput without capital
Scheduling across mixed equipment under one supervisory layer often releases capacity that looked like it needed a new machine.
PSSR 2000 compliance
An autoclave is pressure equipment. The UK regulates it as such.
The Pressure Systems Safety Regulations 2000 require a written scheme of examination drawn up by a competent person, and examination in accordance with it. Operators routinely discover this late — often when an insurer or a customer audit asks for the paperwork.
We help you get ahead of it: identifying what is in scope, liaising with your competent person, and making sure the equipment and its records support the scheme rather than fighting it.
- Scope review — what is pressure equipment and what is not
- Written scheme of examination support
- Competent-person liaison and access provision
- Record keeping that satisfies an inspector
In scope, typically
What a UK inspector looks at
- Pressure vesselWritten scheme
- Relief devicesSet pressure verified
- Door interlockFunction proved
- PipeworkScheme dependent
- RecordsAvailable on request
- Competent personNamed, independent
Independent advisory
Acoustic emission testing
AE listens to a vessel under load and locates active defects in real time. Unlike hydrostatic retesting it does not require the vessel to be filled, drained and dried, and it does not risk introducing damage in the course of proving there is none.
- DowntimeHours, not days
- Vessel filledNo
- Defect locationReal time
- Insurer acceptedCase dependent
NDT advisory
An independent view on whether your vessel is fit to keep running.
We provide non-destructive testing advisory — including acoustic emission — independent of any particular test house. That matters: the question of whether a twenty-year-old vessel should be retested, repaired or retired is one where the advice ought not to come from whoever sells the test.
This capability is genuinely unusual among autoclave suppliers, and it is the reason a number of customers first call us about equipment we did not build.
Sectors
Same physics. Very different consequences.
01
Aerospace
Primary and secondary structure, engine components and space hardware — where the process specification is contractual and the audit is annual. The requirements that drive our designs come from this sector.
02
Defence
Hard armour plate, helmet shells and UHMWPE laminates. Tight processing windows, high pressure, and a failure mode that shows up on the range rather than on the shop floor.
03
Motorsport
Carbon monocoques and aerodynamic surfaces, where cycle time is the constraint and the deadline is a race weekend. Five different cure cycles in a week without transcription errors.
04
Energy & nuclear
Equipment destined for a licensed site carries a documentation burden that exceeds the engineering one. Our quality system produces that record as a by-product of manufacture.
Describe the process problem.
Not the machine you think you need — the parts that are failing, the cycle that is too long, or the audit finding you have to close.