Business Achievers Honoured

The Companies behind engineering innovations as diverse as Bluetooth chips and monitoring equipment for electrical switchgear are among the winners of this year's Queen's Awards for Enterprise, announced on 21 April.

Billed as the UK's most prestigious accolades for business-related achievement, the Awards are made in three categories: International Trade, Innovation and Sustainable Development. This year, 119 businesses have been chosen as recipients.

One of the 40 companies named in the Innovation category is CSR, which developed the BlueCore family of single-chip products for implementing Bluetooth wireless communications links between devices. Another winner, Solagen, was chosen “for its work in developing solar powered road signs that maximise power generation and minimize its consumption." Solagen director David Barraclough explained that the company’s products have always been designed to be efficient, using small solar panels and drawing only milliamps. “We spend a lot on R&D, “he said, “and always use the most efficient LED’s available.”

Solagen was founded in 2001. It designs, builds and installs vehicle-activated signs, flashing lights for school crossings and LED illumination panels for fixed signs to UK and Irish standards.

Barraclough aid “When we applied for the award, I wondered if we were big enough to interest them, but we are innovators, and in a business that’s environmentally friendly. It’s a great honour.”

An apparently more arcane product secured an award for Bishop's Stortford-based Optical Metrology Services. Denise Smiles, director of business development, explains: "We measure pipe ends for the oil and gas industry. We're the only people in the world who have developed the technology to take an inordinate amount of measurement very quickly.^­”

The OMS Pipe Checker Automatic is a laser measure­ment tool that can be configured to measure the inside and outside diameters of the pipe ends, while the associated software provides matching information so that, pipes can be sorted and rotated to give the best connections.

The UltraTEV Detector, a best-selling instrument for testing electrical switchgear, began life in a Dublin pub. EA Technology instruments director Neil Davies and instruments manager Colin Vickers used a beer mat to draw up the specification for a new kind of handheld instrument to measure partial discharge activity in HV assets.

Davies says: "The detector is extremely effective as a first pass method of measuring asset condition, whether on individual H V assets or whole plants and networks. Engineers previously had to use several pieces of complex and expensive equipment to do the same job.''

Applications for the 2008 awards must be made by 31st October 2007.

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