Materials analysis company’s major investment

Axiom’s materials department has recently invested £100,000 in cutting edge equipment in the hope of winning new contracts in the aerospace industry.

The new equipment has replaced or upgraded equipment within our in-house laboratories to help with the aim of AXIOM achieving UKAS accreditation in the future and keep us as one of the world’s leading forensic materials science consultancies.

The UKAS accreditation would allow AXIOM to win more projects within the aerospace and off-shore industries. Among the new additions to Axiom’s technological equipment is a replacement scanning electron microscope (SEM) which can magnify materials up to 200,000 times.

Principal materials engineer, Dr René Hoyle explained: “Although the SEM works up to 200,000 times magnification, we usually we work in the 20 times-10,000 time’s magnification range.

“The SEM has a much greater depth-of-field than an ordinary microscope which allows us to see the peaks and troughs of the fracture in three-dimensional detail.”

So far, the new addition has helped solve the failure of a pipe in a steam generating plant, identified a mysterious yellow substance blighting a waste-energy boiler plant and helped examine the effect of temperatures in excess of 1000 degrees centigrade on thin metal foils.

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