Touch, filter, freeze, or detect chemistry of winning engineers?

HRH the Duke of Edinburgh will present a £50,000 pounds prize and a gold award medal to the winner of this year's competition at the Academy Awards Dinner in London on June 9th, 2008.  The MacRobert award recognizes the successful development of innovative ideas in engineering and the academy seeks to demonstrate the importance of engineering and the role of engineers and scientists in contribution to national prosperity and internal prestige.

Finger power
Touch Bionics' i-LIMB Hand looks and acts like a real human hand with five individually powered digits, represents a new generation in bionics and patient care, complemented  with US-based Livingskin, which Touch Bionics recently acquired for its product portfolio. The key innovation behind the i-LIMB Hand is the multi-articulating finger technology, which has underpinned the product's resounding commercial success since its launch.
Can the fingers take the gold award medal?

The i-LIMB Hand started life in 1963 in a research programme at Edinburgh's Princess Margaret Rose Hospital to help children affected by Thalidomide. Touch Bionic's core intellectual property is patent-secured and, through the development of the i-LIMB Hand, the company now leads the upper limb prosthetics market in three core areas: cosmesis (skin), controls and mechanical form factor.

"The i-LIMB Hand is one of the most compelling devices in the world prosthetics market," says Touch Bionics CEO Stuart Mead. "Since we launched it in July 2007 over 200 patients have been fitted with it all over the world - in just a few months it has evolved from an exciting new technology into a new benchmark in prosthetic devices."
Team members: CEO Stuart Mead: director of research and founder David Gow: project manager Stewart Hill: director of technology and operations Hugh Gill:  director of marketing Phil Newman. All based at Touch Bionics in Livingston.

Polar position
The Automation Partnership based in the UK and Wilmington US also shortlisted for the prestigious technology award for its innovative sample storage system Polar designed to reliably store invaluable tissue samples and blood-derived fractions at ultra low temperatures.

It meets the demand from national Biobanks, academic institutions and pharmaceutical R&D for an automated large-scale repository for long term storage of biological samples down to -80°C and has provided Polar to the UK Biobank in Manchester, England, which will be the world's biggest resource studying the role of nature and nurture in health and disease.

Team members: Head of hardware engineering Justin Owen: senior project manager Robert Meaker: engineer Frank Tully: software engineer James Pilgrim: product manager Peter Woods. All based at TAP  in Royston, Herts.
Is Polar able to freeze out the competition?

Owlstone detection
Owlstone Nanotech Inc.  a subsidiary of Advance Nanotech Corp, has been also been selected.  Owlstone successfully developed a coin-sized silicon chip using its proprietary FAIMS technology, that can detect a wide variety of chemicals in real time from virtually any location and send back real-time results to a command station.
Can Boyd and the Owlstone outwit non-nano contenders?

Koehl  began the development of Owlstone's fundamental technology in
2001 at Caltech with further development at Cambridge University, UK 
and is inventor of the Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility Spectrometer technology at the core of the Owlstone. That technology was furthered as he was joined by Paul Boyle, a researcher in the Microsystems and Nanotech group at Cambridge University who was responsible for the design and development of the silicon-opto hybrid devices for next generation telecom systems, and David Ruiz-Alonso, a Cambridge University PhD in superconductor modelling.

 "Our commercial opportunity is enormous given the need for new and innovative deployment scenarios in chemical detection for homeland security, industrial process control, environmental and healthcare markets," says Koehl. Team & co-founders: President operations Billy Boyle: President products Andrew Koehl and President technology David Ruiz-Alonzo: All based at Owlstone Ltd at St John's Innovation Centre, Cambridge.

Catalyst and filter
The fourth player is Johnson Matthey, former winner of the 2000 MacRobert Award for the Continuously Regenerating Trap -  the leading technology for controlling soot emissions from trucks and buses. The team has now developed special catalysts and an innovative precision manufacturing process that combines catalyst and filter into a single unit, small enough to fit into the restricted space of the car diesel engine compartment.  Here it can use all the heat from the engine to control hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide as well as soot emissions. The compact soot filter is not only energy and materials efficient to manufacture, in use it contributes to reduced carbon dioxide emissions due to its high thermal efficiency and much reduced weight.
Filtering the other out in the winning second lap?

"We have already exported over 1.5m of these filters for use in European cars ahead of new emissions control legislation which comes into force from 2009", says  chief scientist Dr Martyn Twigg. "These alone will stop millions kilogrammes of soot entering the atmosphere over the life of  vehicles. We have built two new state of the art plants in Royston Hertfordshire to manufacture these filter, creating  300 new jobs on the site".
Team members: Chief scientist Dr Martyn Twigg, diesel development manager Dr Paul Phillips;   GM sales and operations Antoine Bordet. All based at Johnson Matthey in Royston, Herts.