RECOGNITION in the latest tranche of Millennium Products is not the first accolade in the scheme for one Hamble firm.

Carbospars now has two of its developments recognised for their innovation - the latest under a new company division of Smart Fibres.

Managing director Damon Roberts said the latest honour was for a pioneering sensor which measures strain within composite materials.

The Optical Fibre Strain Monitoring System is being tested in a yacht fitted with another of the firm's Millennium Products - the Aero Rig.

"We are very pleased to receive Millennium Product Status and we believe that it shows significant innovation and development,'' said Mr Roberts.

"Our particular product has a huge range of potential applications and could be used in every engineering walk of life,'' he said.

"It could potentially transform the way people look at structures.''

Success of the new product is set to mean dramatic expan-sion for Smart Fibres which has just moved to new offices in Hamble and expects to recruit He said the potential stems from the fact that the optical fibre networks can be surface attached to steel and concrete structures, or embedded into concrete, for accurate structural health monitoring.

Based in Hamble, Smart Fibres designs and manufactures optical fibre strain sensor systems for use in a wide range of industries, including marine, aeronautical and engineering.

"We have built on the extensive research carried out during a £1.1 million government-funded project which brought together the UK's leading photonics and composites experts from industry and academia,'' he said.

Following on from the successful completion of this project, Smart Fibres team has developed key manufacturing processes to enable this novel technological concept to become a commercial reality.

Mr Roberts said optical fibre sensors are embedded during construction and then continuously interrogated by a sophisticated electronic system that provides a readout of the load conditions of the application.

In the event of a structural failure the system can provide a black box record of events leading to the failure.

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.