So far 2020 has seen our test house facilities in fairly constant use. We are also planning improvements to our laboratory space along with the movement of some equipment and tooling facilities to another unit. As such we are currently booked out to the end of May for longer term testing, with some short-term availability at the beginning of April.

For our outgassing customers, our dedicated outgassing testing facility will not be disrupted by the planned facility works.

At the end of 2019 we took delivery of a new chamber which is to become TVAC#3. We are expecting delivery of the pumps and other hardware in the coming weeks (the pumping system will be the same as TVAC#1 and #2 i.e. oil free). We had planned to begin work on setting up the chamber at the start of 2020 but our test house has had a rather busy start to the year so it has, frustratingly, had to wait.

We are also about to start, in the coming month, upgrading our lab facility. A new floor will be poured and laid as well as an overhaul to the power distribution and facilities within the lab. As with all big projects, we plan for everything to go to schedule and be back up and running within 1-2 weeks but there is the possibility of delays getting our chambers re-commissioned and ready.

​We have just shipped a custom outgassing chamber to a US customer. While our own outgassing facility is in virtually constant use, we haven't been contracted to build an outgassing test system in some time.​

The thermal, vacuum pump and valve systems are fully computer controlled with the bell jar being lifted via an electrical screw jack. This makes operating the system in terms of loading samples, pumping down and bringing the Knudsen cells to temperature extremely user friendly. We were so pleased with it we were tempted to keep it for ourselves!

If you are interested in our outgassing chamber build, or our in-house outgassing services, please feel free to get in touch.

We are lucky to have had the problem of too much work for our TVAC chambers through most of 2019. Both TVAC#1 and TVAC#2 are currently occupied, with TVAC#2 finally getting some down time for maintenance at the end of this month. TVAC#1 is currently occupied with a longer term R&D contract but is booked to be turned around immediately after.

We have upgrades for TVAC#2 currently in production, with a new cold shroud and IR mountings to improve cooling rates/min temperatures as well as reduce down time for things like IR lamp replacements. We've also increased the data feedthroughs available on the chamber which was necessary for another last-minute test, for which we were able to manufacture, clean, fit and leak test our own dual-dsub connector feedthrough in just under a week.

All of our test house services (thermal vacuum chambers, outgassing test facility and vacuum UV exposure chambers) have been incredibly busy this year. We received delivery of our new vacuum chamber TVAC#2 in the last few days of 2017 and by July 2018 the system was put to work for flight hardware bakeouts and several thermal vacuum cycling tests. TVAC#1 is currently down for maintenance and should be back online beginning of 2019.

In June we also supported the 2018 edition of 'Aerospace Test & Validation' with various images from our test house equipment and solar simulator products. ​This is a new publication from the publishers of the Test House Directory focused specifically on the Aerospace industry. ​You can read the digital version here.

Our outgassing facility has been extremely busy also, with our facility taking part in the ESA inter-laboratory ECSS-Q-ST-70-02C outgassing quantification study in July this year.

In 2019 we will be expanding our test facilities to include FTIR capabilities. Check our news page or  follow us on Twitter for announcements on this.

Our solar simulator builds have also been consistent throughout the year, with several of our smaller Unisim Compact solar simulator systems shipping out. We have also had some larger system builds with custom specifications. We are also looking to at a short R&D project for our Unisim N-Zone simulators which will push their capabilities into larger working areas. The materials for this have just been delivered and will be scheduled when we start 2019.

We have been busy in the second half of 2018 with, amongst other projects, several large simulator builds. Our Unisim Compact range of small, close-match solar simulators continue to also prove popular and our last system in stock has just shipped to the University of New South Wales.

We are continuing to work on the application of LED technology to our close-match simulators and have some interesting R&D work coming up in 2019 which will take our N-Zone solar simulator design to large area applications.

2018 has been very busy for our thermal vacuum chambers TVAC#1 and TVAC#2 as we have conducted bakeout and TVAC cycling work for a range of customers, including quite a lot of components for the ESA Solar Orbiter mission.

​We are currently designing a full IR heat shroud for TVAC#2 to be fitted in 2019. We had hoped to complete in late 2018 but demand for the chamber has meant maintenance time has been limited.

We are excited to announce that we will be expanding our lab capabilities to include FTIR analysis via transmission and ATR in early 2019. This facility will primarily be used for analysing molecular witness plates for contamination control during vacuum bakeouts. However, we will also be offering FTIR analysis of condensables collected from our standard outgassing test. There will be further announcements via this news page and our main test facilities page when this becomes available.

The installation of our new thermal vacuum chamber is slightly behind schedule but we are still on track to start testing the vacuum and thermal control system at the end of this month. New custom flanges for the old gate valve port are in the final stages of fabrication and finishing, the scroll and mag-lev turbo molecular pumps are installed and the control systems for the thermal plate are starting testing the end of this week.

TVAC#2 has water cooled door seals and chamber walls which means it will be capable of higher maximum temperatures than TVAC#1. We are also installing a thermal plate design we developed for a customer several years ago to achieve a very uniform temperature when using LN2 for cold temperatures and dwells.

There are also further re-designs from the thermal system of TVAC#1 which will be tested in TVAC#2 and will be used to upgrade TVAC#1 in the future.

Follow this blog for future updates or keep an eye on our test house page for when TVAC#2 is fully operational.

While we do not recommend working under such conditions, we are sometimes asked to help with urgent test requirements with little time to prepare.

​We were recently contacted with very short notice for a thermal vacuum test requirement. Less than two weeks after receiving the test procedure document we had begun the test and, even with the chamber not being configured how we would have liked it and the test procedure being altered by the customer 'on-the-fly', the test was completed on schedule. The results of the test were critical to the acceptance of a flight component and as such the customer was able to meet their deadline due to our rapid response.

A customer requirement for baking out hundreds of thermocouples meant pushing the capacity of our TVAC chamber. The down-time between bakeouts gave us a week to measure, design, manufacture, clean and fit spool system for loading the thermocouples. We were constrained by our temperature controlled shroud, but we were able to fit the components in time and complete the bakeout.

Our chamber can be fitted with a large a range of temperature controlled shrouds we have manufactured for it. However, we are able to manufacture new shrouds to accommodate samples which are more tricky to mount.

For this particular bakeout the samples need to be suspended in the center of the chamber. We were able to get a design to our highly skilled engineer within the day and continued the re-configuring of the chamber while the machining was being undertaken. Computer controlled DC power supplies were installed into the control rig and the PID software updated to take care of the temperature control of the multi-segment shroud. In a week we had the new shroud installed along with re-routed thermocouples, QCM and cold plate lines. The bakeout was then started on-schedule thanks to our quick turnaround.