We are spending this summer looking at how we can re-engineer what we do at Silent Sensors to make the planet better for everyone. We’ve always had an environmental goal as our original tagline was “Smarter • Safer • Greener”, which was what the ONTRACK and related grants have all been about.

Our Horizon 2020 Project ONTRACK, awarded in October 2017 and completed in March 2020, followed by other projects funded by Innovate UK (PROFIT in 2020, INTENSE in 2023), plus the two GEIC grants in 2021 and 2022: all have all been to embed tags and sensors within the rubber of tyres to prevent accidents and manage their lifecycle.

The goal is to improve the environmental impact of tyres by extending tyre life, preventing buying new tyres too early in their lifetime, as well as reducing emissions caused by accidents due to tyre blow-outs. We continue to progress this work.

Bringing tyre projects to market takes a minimum of 7-10 years, this due to regulatory and certification requirements, just like with pharma and healthcare. Even with the wind blowing strongly in our direction, we would still be many years away.  The impact of COVID on our main commercial partners’ R&D programmes took a lot of wind out of our sails, delaying projects by at least two years. We are still 3-5 years away from bringing a tyre product to the market, and the RFID solution from ONTRACK remains a work in progress and testing.

We have had long internal discussions about what can we do that leverages all our work in polymers and rubber, yet does not require a long timeframe before we can bring a product to the market and see revenue coming in, as is the case with tyre products.

From this we identified a new activity we can focus on: increasing the recycling rates of polymer/plastic long-life multi-use plastics such as ABS. You will see much more of this in the immediate future as we develop some quick-to-market offerings.

We have also looked at the skill sets our engineers have developed over the past years to test, print, measure and characterise the work done. We are putting together a skills service to propose to companies that use polymers and rubber and who lack either equipment or expert knowledge. We will also look within the broader community of tech companies present in Future Space, to see what they can offer us and what we can offer them.

We have been buoyed by shareholders continuing to invest in us at this pivotal moment. We have written four grant applications, all of which help move us further and faster into this new area of marking long-life, multi-use long-term plastics for recycling. 

We will learn about grant award results over the next quarter; we are certainly hopeful of winning some of these.

We know this activity can be broadened to include products used in commercial and passenger vehicles, keeping us engaged with earlier work. 

So 2024 has become a sea-change year for us: our move to Bristol, with new offices and lab space; Zois coming on board, with his PhD in mechanical engineering and deep background in chemistry, material science and in developing piezo materials; a significant ramping up of grant applications; and finally new positioning and material aimed at new markets, key players and new investment, starting in this Autumn and headed up by Carla.

Stay tuned for more news as we start to show you why our new tagline “Smart • Safe • Sustainable” is so valid, and we bring you up to date with new R&D activities.