The West Midlands is being heralded as the next possible location for revolutionary laser scanning technology able to create 3D colour images in near microscopic detail.
The new company behind the technology, Kestrel 3D, currently has sites in Belfast, Stirling and Dundee, but is talking to prospective partners about establishing a 3D scanning and imaging bureau in an existing Centre of Excellence - with Aston, Coventry and Warwick cited as possible locations.
Kestrel 3Ds Midlands-based marketing director, John Bradley, who previously worked for JCB and LDV, said: Given the regions rich engineering heritage in sectors like automotive, aerospace and agriculture, we see the West Midlands as a particularly viable location.
We already work with first tier suppliers to the Midlands motor industry, in Northern Ireland - via our 3D content creation centre in Queens University, Belfast - and we are leading the way in ensuring this technological advancement becomes an accepted part of the engineering process.
He added: Cutting time and costs from production cycles is a significant driving force within the engineering sector and a sure step towards this goal is collecting high-quality data quickly and accurately.
For example, customers can have components scanned and imported into CAD/CAM programmes to facilitate and improve manufacturing processes - and the higher quality the image, the more efficient and cost effective the design process.
Kestrel claims its scanners are the only machines worldwide that register colour and position/dimension at the same time, resulting in an extremely high quality digital model.
Typical applications include reverse engineering, in which parts can be disassembled and analysed as a scanned image, allowing product development through redesign or rapid prototyping.
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