In a constantly fluid economy, continuous innovation is a primary focus for the manufacturing industry in order to maintain its footing.
Titan Enterprises has been manufacturing optimised liquid flow metering solutions for more than 40 years. Supplying a diverse range of industries, Titan’s design and engineering expertise is fundamental to the company’s success.
Trevor Forster, Managing Director of Titan Enterprises, founded the company in 1981 with the aim of producing modestly priced, high-quality, low flow measuring devices for OEM customers. Trevor recognised from the outset that improvisation and creativity were the key to securing their footing in the market, delivering affordable and lasting solutions that resolved issues for their customers.
Titan’s R&D is primarily driven by customers looking for solutions that will support their specific applications and deliver more efficient, reliable and accurate results. “More than once we’ve been told ‘You can’t do that’, but we’ve just done it anyway!”
Trevor recalls. “The way we work with customers from research, development, through to production has enabled us to solve a lot of OEM application issues,” Trevor adds. “Through that process, we’ve helped customers decrease their assembly times, improve efficiency, and provide extra functionality.”
R&D projects could be anything from testing new materials for longer life, chemical inertness, robustness, testing under high pressure or temperature or software development. Design improvements and technological advancements are focused around finding innovative solutions for our OEM customers, pushing the boundaries of both the physical properties and performance of the products.
Some of Titan’s most popular flow meters have been born out of collaborations. “We have a proud history of working with some of industry’s key players, such as Coca Cola Enterprises Ltd, RS Components and Vianet, to industry specialists like Formular 1, the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II team, Paxman Coolers, Stored Crop Conservation and Green Fuels,” Trevor says. “Our USP is our flexibility, adaptability and ability to work with customers to understand their applications and find workable solutions.”
Work on developing a viable, accurate ultrasonic meter began in 2001 with a collaboration between Titan’s R&D team and The Cranfield Institute of Technology. The resulting patented ultrasonic technology led to an expanding line of Atrato® ultrasonic flowmeters.
“We do not shy away from spending on Research and Development. Industry doesn’t stand still and investing in R&D is paramount to us staying ahead of the game and taking advantage of the latest technologies. Our R&D spend is 20% of our turnover where the norm is 8-10%,” Trevor says.
The focus technology for Titan at present is our ultrasonic liquid flow measurement devices. Taking our Atrato® ultrasonic flowmeter product design understanding, we have pushed both electronics and physical design to improve the overall performance window. From our extensive pioneering work with a USA medical company to produce a disposable ultrasonic flowmeter that measures the volume of liquid manually injected into a patient, to recently launching our new software interface for the Atrato.
Trevor concludes, “When you are confident in your own capabilities, willing to take a few risks, invest resources into R&D and know what your customers and market want, taking on challenges can be very fruitful.”
