Industry Case Studies
To understand how our environmental testing laboratory could benefit your business, read more about the type of services we have already delivered across a variety of industry sectors.
Commercial Packaging
Products are normally thought of by their content or the function that they perform. The packaging used significantly contributes to the branding, protection, performance and resilience of the product, so testing is a key feature of market success.
Leonardo has worked closely with the food and drinks industry sector over a long period. For high quality gift products such as Scotch Malt Whisky, it is critical that the product reaches the customer in perfect condition. Our understanding of the land-based and airfreight shipping environments has enabled the company to develop a range of tests tailored to ensuring product integrity as delivered to the customer.
Customers undertaking these tests benefit from independent certification of their packaging technologies in a range of environments. Successful testing in these conditions can ensure that any weaknesses in the packaging design can be rectified before the product launch.
Medical Instrumentation
The Leonardo Environmental Testing Laboratory was approached by a leading medical technology company to test new imaging technology ahead of its international launch. We applied extensive expertise in testing a range of laser and optical devices for our own military products to ensure the integrity of the new technology. Where available, we comply in full with the requirements of the appropriate standard and with any other criteria prescribed by the body granting approval.
The environmental conditions that the medical equipment would experience during transportation, storage and operations throughout the world were reviewed, leading to a comprehensive test programme being developed to simulate these conditions and thereby test the continued quality of the product.
Space Technology
In the space environment, detailed and exhaustive dynamic and climatic testing under vacuum conditions and over a wide temperature range is necessary to simulate the extremes that space-bound technology needs to survive.
Successful testing in these conditions identifies any weaknesses in the design, thereby allowing any technology to be rectified before launch. This enables the product to be qualified such that failures during launch, entering operations and through the operational life are eliminated where possible. In this environment there are no second chances.
Leonardo has over 40 years of experience in the space sector. In the environmental testing sector, the company has had particular success in the testing of mechanical and micro-electromechanical (MEMS) gyro technologies and their supporting electronic systems. We have worked with the European Space Agency and satellite primes to develop new and standards for some elements of the testing design to suit the new technology and demands of the mission. Extensive testing was completed including EMC, ESD, thermal vacuum, vibration and shock testing to high levels.
In addition to in-house product qualification, Leonardo has completed environmental testing campaigns on technologies for space including power supplies, solar array and miniaturised systems for a number of applications.
Wind and Renewable Energy
The UK is at the forefront of developing technologies and systems necessary to capture wind and other renewable energy. Research and development of hydraulically efficient power generation from wind turbines required an engineering design company to approach Leonardo to ask for advice on Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) – testing their novel control systems for a hydraulic machine.
Through a number of visits between sites and considerable discussion to understand the requirements, Leonardo provided a test regime designed to expose the equipment to vibration equivalent to that seen in service. The vibration tests applied were essentially Sine on Random tests through a step stress approach which were tuned using data measured on a live test rig.
It was a steep collaborative learning curve for the client specialists who had no experience in vibration testing and for the Leonardo environmental engineering team which had no experience in the wind turbine field. The work was completed under tight financial constraints and achieved the desired results. A number of product design improvements were identified enabling the full potential of the product design to be realised.
