In Battersea, London, you can’t move for testing apparatus.
Equipment that tracks printability and flowability, thermal behaviour and mechanical behaviour, muscle movement and impact resistance. Testing rigs that use pneumatic pistons to vertically swing hammers into objects. And small scales that use gravity to compare the resistance of falling weights.
RHEON Labs pulls terabytes of data from this range of equipment to understand the performance and characteristics of its proprietary material technology. It informs R&D and convinces customers, and while the equipment and data can go some way to articulating the fundamentals of its technology, the best way is still with a simple squeeze and strike.
Do the first slowly, and the sample part appears soft and malleable, but do the second with force, and the same part is stiff and resilient.
This concept has been applied to every product RHEON has enabled. Whether it be curved knee protectors, optimised bike saddles, or American football helmet liners, the parts use these characteristics to enable motion control or energy dampening. The technology’s origins stretch back to research conducted at NASA, with RHEON Labs founder Dan Plant continuing down this path while at Imperial College London over a decade ago. Once Plant had identified potential applications in head protection, body protection, tension migration and movement control, he founded RHEON in 2017.
What came next was a steady realisation of the aforementioned products, first in injection moulding, then in film extrusion, then composite damping, and now pellet extrusion 3D printing.
No matter the product and no matter the process, it is the properties of RHEON’s energy-absorbing polymer material that bring the applications to life. RHEON refers to this material in many ways. It is, at once, a highly strain-sensitive, non-Newtonian, thermoplastic super polymer, which when combined with advanced design methods, enables the development of high-performance metamaterials.
