In Battersea, London, you possibly can’t transfer for testing equipment.
Tools that tracks printability and flowability, thermal behaviour and mechanical behaviour, muscle motion and impression resistance. Testing rigs that use pneumatic pistons to vertically swing hammers into objects. And small scales that use gravity to match the resistance of falling weights.
RHEON Labs pulls terabytes of knowledge from this vary of kit to grasp the efficiency and traits of its proprietary materials know-how. It informs R&D and convinces prospects, and whereas the tools and information can go some solution to articulating the basics of its know-how, one of the best ways continues to be with a easy squeeze and strike.
Do the primary slowly, and the pattern half seems comfortable and malleable, however do the second with pressure, and the identical half is stiff and resilient.
This idea has been utilized to each product RHEON has enabled. Whether or not it’s curved knee protectors, optimised bike saddles, or American soccer helmet liners, the components use these traits to allow movement management or vitality dampening. The know-how’s origins stretch again to analysis performed at NASA, with RHEON Labs founder Dan Plant persevering with down this path whereas at Imperial School London over a decade in the past. As soon as Plant had recognized potential purposes in head safety, physique safety, pressure migration and motion management, he based RHEON in 2017.
What got here subsequent was a gradual realisation of the aforementioned merchandise, first in injection moulding, then in movie extrusion, then composite damping, and now pellet extrusion 3D printing.
Irrespective of the product and regardless of the method, it’s the properties of RHEON’s energy-absorbing polymer materials that carry the purposes to life. RHEON refers to this materials in some ways. It’s, directly, a extremely strain-sensitive, non-Newtonian, thermoplastic tremendous polymer, which when mixed with superior design strategies, allows the event of high-performance metamaterials.