WJ Group innovates with new £500k Accelerated Product Tester

WJ Group innovates with new £500k Accelerated Product Tester

WJ Group has invested over £500,000 to install its Accelerated Product Tester, an advanced piece of equipment that can assess the durability and performance over time of various highway maintenance and improvement products.

Traditionally these turntables, as they are commonly called, would be able to assess road markings, high friction surfacing and other materials laid flat to the surface. Significantly, WJ’s innovative system will be the first of its kind in Europe to be able to test road studs, enabling the rapid testing of road studs without the need for extensive and lengthy road trials to assess initial results.

With road studs being an integral part of the UK’s highway system, ensuring that they’re capable of withstanding continuous pressure applied by travelling cars and HGVs over extended periods of time is vital to avoiding unnecessary road maintenance and its associated costs. However, until now, there has been no method of quickly ascertaining the durability of prototypes of these products without having to send them to road trials.

The innovative machine, which will be housed at WJ’s Engineer depot in Stoke-on-Trent, has four tyres to mimic the loads of both an HGV and a standard car. When in operation, two wheels with the equivalent load of a car and two of an HGV will run over the road markings and studs thanks to the turntable’s spinning mechanism. Over one week, this will see the products tested by both loads up to one million times. Currently, this is only achievable overseas over a number of weeks, offering significant improvements to current testing capabilities.

Not only will this enable the faster testing of products for the UK road network, but the innovative turntable will provide the most reliable durability readings compared to other accelerated wear testing machines across Europe. This is due to the force exerted on the testing plates, which on other turntables varies but the maximum is approximately 300kg, whereas WJ’s will be able to apply 2000kg on the HGV tyres and 900kg for the car, much more closely replicating real world conditions.

Bringing the testing to Stoke-on-Trent, WJ will be able to test various new products and materials quickly and efficiently to understand their performance, reducing development timescales. This will help new products come to market much more rapidly, enhancing the innovative capability of the UK highways industry.

Using its own equipment will also see WJ reduce the carbon footprint of the company’s testing operations. Designed in conjunction with WJ’s R&D team, the Accelerated Product Tester has been developed by specialist equipment company Hassell’s, based in Stoke-on-Trent.

Martin Webb, the Innovation Director at WJ Group commented: “Before the development of our new Accelerated Product Tester, there was no way of producing this level of testing in the UK. It would take over six weeks to send products to turntables around Europe, however, this didn’t completely replicate real-life scenarios as the pressures exerted are far lower. Or we could send them for a road trial in Belgium, which slowed the process down.

“Our system will be much closer to real life forces and will offer us and our customers the most accurate readings to date. This significant investment signals our determination to continue to innovate and ensure our roads are the safest they can be.”