Our Facilities
SST has research laboratory space as a co-located technology incubator site near the UConn Campus in Storrs Mansfield, CT. SST has access to UConn’s fully-equipped Thermal Spray Facility, which includes: an enclosed spray booth with extensive pollution control devices and a fully programmable six-axis robot; two DC arc plasma guns, including a METCO 9MB, and a Bay State PG 140, as well as high velocity oxygen fuel (HVOF) gun, the METCO Water-Cooled Diamond Jet Hybrid. Additional equipment includes an Oerlikon-Metco SinplexProTM cascading arc plasma spray gun, and Control Vision SprayCamTM plasma flame diagnostic instrument. The facility is operated by two full-time research engineers with over 15 years of combined thermal spray experience, especially with the SPPS process.
Partnerships
SST is in partnership with the UConn Technology Incubation Program (TIP), and has full access to the university research facilities as an internal user. The main research facility of interest at UConn is the Institute of Materials Science (IMS), which has state-of-the-art materials characterization instruments with dedicated technician operators. New purchase price value of the instruments is in excess of $20 million. Particularly relevant to the present program, IMS has three scanning electron microscopes (SEM), two transmission electron microscopes (TEM), and two X-ray diffractometers. In addition, SST also has full access to the research facilities at UConn Center for Clean Energy Engineering (C2E2), which is in close vicinity of SST Thermal Spray Lab. C2E2 has multiple high temperature furnaces, two SEMs, one X-ray diffractometer, and one dilatometer.