We are pleased to announce that our second thermal vacuum test chamber, TVAC#2, is now fully tested and online. In the first week already we have managed to accommodate a last-minute test requirement for a customer and we are now pre-baking the chamber in preparation for a series of flight hardware bakeouts.

The chamber features:

• PID controlled thermal plate with resistive heating and liquid channels for cooling either by chiller circulator or LN2
• Cold trap with removable fascia for lab analysis if required
• QCM for bakeout monitoring 
• Residual Gas Analyser (Hiden Analytical)
• Standard 16 T-type thermocouple channels (more channels, or different TC types can be added with notice)
• Temperature, pressure, QCM and RGA all logged digitally
• Door seal and chamber wall fluid cooling lines for high temperature tests (>300°C)
• Scroll pump and magnetically levitated turbo molecular pump meaning a completely oil-free pumping system

We also have a multi-part shroud under manufacture which will use the same resistive heating and fluid line design as the thermal plate. This is scheduled to be installed towards the end of the year when we tend to have more downtime for our test house facilities.

As you are no doubt aware by the multitude of emails you will have received from every website you've ever visited, the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on the 25/05/18. It is essentially an attempt to bring a unified set of regulations to the privacy of data collected by websites and transparency to how/why websites collect their users' data. We would like to draw your attention to the changes we have made to our website and associated policies in order to comply with these regulations.

Firstly, we would like to make clear that the only information we collect is via our Contact page and Test Quote Request form and this information is only ever used to keep a record of your enquiry, facilitate our response and, if you opted in, send the occasional newsletter. We have never and will never sell or pass on our user's data to third party companies. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information.

As stated in our Cookie Policy our side does use Google analytics cookies for monitoring site usage.

In order to comply with the upcoming GDPR regulations we have carried out the following:

• We have updated our Terms and Conditions
• We have updated our Privacy Policy
• We have updated our Cookie Policy 
•  All user data submitted to date via our Contact Page and Test Quote Request form have been deleted. Any new submissions via these forms must agree to the stated Terms and Conditions and actively opt-in to our newsletter. Please note that our newsletter was always an opt-in for our users, but we have concluded this is the easiest and safest way to ensure your privacy preferences are met and to avoid any contravention of the GDPR regulations.

If you have any questions or concerns about what this means with regard to your data or privacy when using our website, please feel free to contact us.

And we're back for 2018!

We have recently taken delivery of a new vacuum chamber which we have already started work on getting it ready for commissioning. Some of the new pumps and control units have arrived and we are currently populating and wiring the control/measurement rack units. This new vacuum chamber system will be TVAC#2 and features water cooling on the chamber walls and, importantly, the door seals, which means it will be capable of higher temperature testing than TVAC#1.

We have used the down time of the chamber in the last few weeks of 2017 to further optimise the PID control for the thermal plate in TVAC#1 which means it is now capable of reaching temperature faster and with negligible overshoot. We continue to see a high demand for bakeouts on TVAC#1 and we are working quickly to get TVAC#2 up and running to help with this.

We continue to develop our solar simulators and have a couple of product enhancements planned for 2018 for both our standard Unisim close match range as well as our Unisim Compact. For a free in-house demonstration of our Unisim Compact, please feel free to contact us.

We hope you all had a good break over the Christmas holiday and look forward to working with you over the coming year.

​As a small company we are remarkably agile in terms of design, manufacture and installation of test equipment for our in-house test services. This allows us to quickly respond to our customer's test requirements by getting custom components machined and fitted. For our customers, this quick turn around can mean the difference between meeting or missing a deadline.