We will not be surprising anyone when we say the last few years have seen dramatic increases in some material prices, which we have tried to help absorb for our customers as much as we can. Similarly, the sharp increase in energy prices from 2021/22 have been felt in our test house work.

Our main chamber day rates and standard outgassing charges have not changed since 2017 and 2018 respectively but for 2023 we will be adding a 10% increase to both the chamber day rate and outgassing charges. Please be aware that we will honour currently quoted work at the old rate, but new quotes for the end of 2022 and going into the new year will be at this new rate.

For our solar simulators which can be a much longer lead time it has been a challenge to keep up with the material price changes, particularly for key components. In 2023 we will be conducting an overhaul of our solar simulator range in terms of pricing and models available, so if you would like a quote for a system please be aware there may be some delay while this is done.

As always, we are hugely appreciative of our customers both new and old and are thankful for your understanding.

We have been monitoring the state of the UK power grid for many years and this year, as you will be undoubtedly be aware by now, several factors have coincided to produce a very uncertain future for the UK electrical grid in the near and medium term.

Obviously for a test-house which provides long-term testing ranging from a few days to even years, the prospect of outages be they planned or unplanned was not something we could simply accept. We understand that our customers have deadlines to meet and that completing their test at TS-Space Systems is usually a single step in a complicated and tightly scheduled process.

As such, in the spring of this year we began a process of investing in backup infrastructure to ensure we can continue working in even the worst of situations. We are installing an industrial UPS system which will be capable of seamlessly switching over and running all of our systems, simultaneously,  for just over 5 hours in the event of a power outage.

In the event that the outage is to last longer this gives us ample time to make the chambers safe in terms of holding vacuum and returning to a safe temperature. We have then invested in dedicated backup generators for each chamber system which we can then switch to, to continue running until the grid power is restored.

At the start of 2020 we took delivery of a new TVAC chamber which we had scheduled to come online mid 2020. However during the UK covid-19 response in March we undertook large scale improvements to our test house involving a new floor being poured and laid along with a complete re-wiring of the laboratory to support the additional equipment we have installed. This required a complete dismantling of all of our test chambers and equipment in order to clear the lab.

Due to this disruption, along with the increased test and manufacturing demand in the second half of the year, we have had to delay the commissioning of TVAC#3 into 2021. Work has continued on the machining of the thermal exchange plate and installation of the pumps on the chamber system. However final run-up and testing is not scheduled until the start of 2021. Once ready the additional chamber in our facility will increase throughput and reduce wait times for TVAC tests.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers who have either been using us for years or have just found is this year. We realise being busy is a very nice problem to have right now and so we thank you for choosing us for your test work.

We would like to thank all of our customers, old and new, for continuing to select our products and services in 2018 and we look forward to working with you in the future. From all of us at TS-Space Systems, we'd like to wish you a very Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year for 2019!

Last day opening 2018: Friday December 21st
First day opening 2019: Wednesday January 2nd

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.

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.