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Writer's pictureMatt Dawson

Orthotropic turns 2!

Updated: Jan 12, 2022


This week at #OrthotropicEngineering we're marking the successful completion of our second full year in business. Fair to say that it's been an unexpectedly eventful few months so we're extremely grateful to our clients for their custom, enabling our continued growth despite the difficult times in which we presently live.


Our main focus this year has been the ongoing development of our design, analysis and consultancy services, targeted primarily at structural applications of composite materials. Amongst other projects, it's been a pleasure to conduct the analysis of the composite spar for the Orbital Marine Power O2-2000 turbine. We've also been pleased to provide composites engineering assistance to old friends at Airborne and consultancy services to Anemoi Marine Power.

Tidal blade spar analysis - Orbital Marine Power

Not all our work has involved composites though: January saw the installation of the steel access bridge we designed for a private client in 2019. We've also just completed the design of a test rig to enable our customer RheEnergise to evaluate critical components of their exciting energy storage system.

Private access bridge installed

Without a doubt, the most unexpected project of the year (to which we gave our time without charge) was the manufacture and free supply of emergency Covid visors at the height of the PPE crisis in April - a complete tangent to our normal activities but impossible not to help under the circumstances! Thanks to help from our local community and all who responded to our crowdfunding drive, we were able to adapt an open-source design, then manufacture and supply 1000 high-quality visors in a little over a month.

Thanks from recipients of our covid visors

In addition to all this activity, we managed to find time to move to a larger office and complete the setup of our R&D workshop: This now boasts a small composites manufacturing facility, seawater conditioning tanks and an adaptable 100kN test frame. We've also managed get our composite materials testing programme underway and were really pleased to host James Tomlinson from the University of Bristol for a summer internship. Thanks for your valuable contribution James - very much appreciated!


Looking ahead to our third year, we hope of course for a return to normality. We look forward to the time when trade fairs cease to be routinely cancelled and we can begin to replace Zoom calls with face-to-face meetings!


Please do get in touch if you have any requirements we could assist with. In the meantime we wish all our friends and customers success and of course good health.



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