News

Imetrum, the manufacturer of real-time non-contact displacement measurement systems used in Material Testing and Structural Monitoring, is pleased to announce the appointment of John Brewster as Managing Director.

John comes to Imetrum with a wealth of Executive and Sales Management experience, for the last 8 years he was a Director of the FTSE 500 company e2v technologies where he was responsible for its $400m global sales activity. For the last 12 months he was based in its Asian Office in Hong Kong because of the region’s overall importance to the future of e2v's business. During his time at e2v he was one of the senior executive team that acquired the business (MBO) from Marconi and 2 years later floated the business on the main London exchange. Post flotation he was actively involved with the $140m acquisition of the French activity of a leading US semiconductor company.

John has been tasked by the shareholders of the business to take the hi-tech spin out from Bristol University to the next business level which involves the further development of the technology to address demanding structural monitoring applications.

The IMETRUM Video Gauge measures strain and displacement on materials, components and structures. It is a non-contact, video based instrument with applications in material testing, component testing and structural monitoring.

Latest developments of the Video Gauge enable it to achieve strain measurement accuracy in line with conventional strain gauges and resolutions down to 5 micro-strain. These developments are available with both the desktop system and the popular laptop based portable system.

Prestige early adopters of the technology have found the system 30 times quicker to set up than existing technology with the added advantage that the system is capable of producing considerably more empirical data. Independent benchmark tests have shown the technology to have an order of magnitude better resolution than other DIC systems.

The Video Gauge is frequently used to overcome challenging measurement problems such as high temperature or high-speed material testing. For straightforward tasks such as batch testing of material properties it offers significant time and cost savings over traditional methods.

Imetrum will give away a copy of the Video Gauge strain measurement software as a prize to the winner of the 2008 BSSM Young Stress Analyst competition.

The BSSM Young Stress Analyst (YSA) competition is an annual competition that is intended to encourage and reward young practitioners in the field of experimental mechanics.

The next competition, sponsored by Airbus UK, AWE plc and Imetrum will take place alongside the 6th BSSM International Conference on Advances in Experimental Mechanics, which will be held at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) London from 9-11th September 2008.

Further details can be found on the BSSM website