AZoNano editor Alina catches up with Ben Proudlove, Merrow Scientific, at HiPerNano 2018.
Please give an introduction to your company.
I'm Ben, from Merrow Scientific, and we provide unique, niche scientific instruments. These are mainly mainly sort of material characterization, thermal conductivity and viscosity equipment.
Are there any products that you are particularly looking to promote today?
The thing that we've been talking most about is measuring thermal conductivity. There are lots of companies here looking at developing new compounds and ingredients, so what we can do is help them to measure the thermal conductivity of liquids and powders based solids in the materials.
What are the applications of your products?
Keeping the focus on thermal conductivity, we have end customers who for example are in the composite industry. They're producing composites, let's say for an a automotive vehicle, and they're perhaps looking at improving thermal conductivity to pull away heat from the battery to get better performance in the battery. So they need to measure the thermal conductivity of their material.
Mayeb they also need to insulate the driver's seat from any heat buildup in the car - that's jyst one application of our thermal conductivity products.
What does your idea customer look like?
All of our kit can go into testing labs, so we are going to supply equipment to them. We also do contract testing, so if companies are interested in the systems but don't have the budget or the requirement to buy their own system, then we'll do contract testing on a kind of sample by sample basis.
Who do you hope to gain from HiPerNano?
We have come here to speak to some of the researchers from universities, and also the companies involved in the nanotechnology sector.