Safe solutions

Measuring the properties of a material and estimating how long it will last is big business — especially in safety-critical situations — so it's comforting to know someone is keeping an eye on the state of aircraft wings or making sure nuclear power stations have pressure vessels that aren't about to split in two.

Another safety-critical area is the medical sector, where there are obvious dire consequences of the failure of commonly-used devices such as needles, sutures, tubing and protective clothing such as gloves. One solution is provided by

, whose in situ 3300 single column medical device system is small enough to be kept within a medical laboratory.

The device can be configured with grips or fixtures to perform tension, compression, flex and peel testing with a load range from 500N to 5kN with a range of custom fixtures for testing specialist components such as biomaterials, dental pieces or orthopaedics.

The system also features its own 'Bluehill' software suite (or optionally a 'TouchPanel' controller) which can be configured to handle whichever type of test is run, handle data analysis and undertake pass/fail analyses.