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.

We have had a very busy start to the year which is why ours news updates have been so few in the past 3 months. We are still very busy with test work (thermal vacuum bakeouts and thermal vacuum cycling) as well as building a large piece of bespoke test equipment for a new customer.

TVAC#1 has been down for maintenance longer than scheduled, primarily due to the sudden influx of test work at the beginning of the year which demanded our attention. We are now just about to begin pumping down and leak testing TVAC#1 and checking the new T/C's and heaters we have fitted. We will also be fitting a PID control unit for the IR heaters to this vacuum chamber so that it has the same capability as TVAC#2.

We have also had delays in obtaining materials required for commissioning our FTIR system for contamination monitoring during bakeouts. We now have everything in stock and will be working to get this established as soon as possible. Our first use of this will be to run blank bakes on our TVAC#1 vacuum test chamber to get it back in service. We will then be able to offer in-house FTIR analysis for contamination control for both our thermal vacuum bakeout facilities.

Finally, we have not reviewed our Outgassing (ECSS-Q-ST-70-02) facility charges for over 4 years and as such a price for this service is planned for later in the year. We will be announcing any changes via our news blog and our newsletter.

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.