Technical consulting
With over 100 PhDs in the company, and a cumulative experience in both academic research and across a wide range of industry sectors that would number many hundreds of man-years, Tessella constitutes a world class problem solving engine.
Our technical consulting service provides a route for our clients to direct that capability at their problems.
Plant Condition Monitoring
Our client had a problem with a specific plant component, operating in an extremely hostile environment. In-service failure of that component would necessitate lengthy, and expensive, down time for the plant, and exposure of staff to the hostile environment. The alternative, and the default regime, of frequent scheduled replacement was considered safe but expensive since most replaced components still had significant residual life.
After concluding that none of the standard approaches showed any promise, the client challenged Tessella to look at the problem and propose a solution.
Tessella developed an acoustic technique which could identify the change in sound patterns from within the equipment when the vulnerable component started to deform, a precursor to failure. This provided enough advance warning to allow an orderly shut down and replacement, whilst maximizing the operating life of the component and minimizing exposure time for workers.
Precise Control of Satellites
In early 2009, two of the largest and most complex scientific spacecraft ever developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) are due to be launched on top of a single Ariane-5 rocket.
Together, the Herschel infrared space telescope and the Planck cosmic microwave mapping mission will seek to answer some of the fundamental questions about the origin and composition of the universe. Tessella was a critical member of the industrial team designing the control systems for the two spacecraft.
Herschel controller design: Tessella designed and tested the attitude controller, which will be used in Herschel’s observation modes. A very sophisticated controller is needed because of the extreme pointing accuracies required, equivalent to focusing on a tennis ball at a distance of 150km.
Planck pointing accuracy: In order to estimate the accuracy with which a spacecraft can point at a target, there are standard techniques for taking the statistical distributions of all contributing errors and combining them to find the distribution of the total error. However, Planck is designed to spin about its axis once every minute, which the standard techniques cannot handle, so new methods for finding the error distribution for a spinning spacecraft had to be devised and applied.
