UPS2
A small but growing business in North Wales has seen exports jump to over 90% of its revenues in the past 12 months.
UPS2 (Ultra-Precision Structured Surfaces) specialises in micro structured large sized patterned moulds. These are typically curved rolls/cylinders for high volume reel to reel fabrication or flat disks for injection moulding.
“Whilst many companies can make micro patterns not many of them have the technology to scale this up to produce large size moulds — up to 2 m long and 0.5 m wide - and maintain the pattern fidelity with nanometre finish on micron scale structures” says John Oliver, Marketing Director.” This has enabled us to reach a global market and gain customers in the USA, mainland Europe, and the Far East.”
UPS2’s customers are using these moulds to imprint new and unique patterns onto plastic or paper in a number of varied markets. These have included healthcare (antibacterial and microfluidics), display screens (light diffusion and 3D imaging), solar (Fresnel lenses to focus light), lighting (to diffuse a sharp beam of LED light to be softer and more evenly spread out) and instrumentation micro lenses. Almost any shapes are possible including squares, pyramids, hexagons, grooves, channels, micro lenslets (with varying aspect ratios) and even diffraction gratings.
A good example of the growing global market is solar manufacturers seeking to improve the efficiencies of concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) modules. The highly accurate diamond turning machine has recently been optimised to improve the performance for Fresnel lens cutting and is capable of manufacturing the largest linear and most accurately shaped radial lenses than anywhere else in the world. "We can cut both conventional and linear Fresnel lenses shapes to a corner sharpness of less than 2 µm and a facet roughness less than 3 nm, resulting in significant improvements in the efficiency of the lens," said John. "Our customers use our drums/moulds in both reel to reel and stamping processes and are reporting improvements in the order of 5%. This may not sound a lot but every few percentage improvement of light falling onto a cell brings a marked improvement to the overall efficiency of the systems. We can also make very large linear master moulds — up to 1.4 m long with multiple pattern repeats — which are proving very popular with our clients.”
However, John admits that their most intriguing patterns are for those customers who chose not to reveal the final application.
UPS2 has recently added a prototyping service where customers can try out variations of new patterns that can be tested prior to full production. The patterns are cut onto an in-house master mould, from which a UV cure lacquered PMMA sample is produced.
UPS2 is a joint venture partnership combining over 40 years’ experience in diamond turning at Cranfield University with the precision engineering facilities and resources of Glyndwr University and is located at the OpTIC Centre in St Asaph, North Wales, UK.