From NASA to Clothing: New Brunswick’s C-Therm Technologies is Everywhere
FREDERICTON – A Fredericton-based company is helping businesses world-wide check their temperature.
Founded in 2007, C-Therm Technologies provides sensor solutions for research and development, manufacturing and quality control environments, offering fast, non-destructive thermal analysis instrumentation.
“We specialize developing and manufacturing specialized systems for the thermal characterization of materials,” Adam Harris, managing director and shareholder at C-Therm. “Specifically how efficiently material transfer heat, that’s described as thermal conductivity.”
C-Therm’s technology can be used in basically anything where heat transfer can become an issue or is significant threat.
One of their clients includes a little organization called NASA.
“There’s lots of areas where they care about insulation, or the heat transfer properties in different components of the spacecraft,” Harris says. “You can think of the ceramic tiles that provide the insulation and the other interior components of it. Even the way the fuel burns . . . is reliant on the thermal conductivity or heat transfer properties.”
C-Therm’s technology is also used various industries on this planet, including ceramics, cosmetics electronics, food and packaging.
“The thing I love about our job here is the diversity of the application. It’s never boring. It’s always a different application,” Harris says. “On the other extreme of that, you got groups like Proctor and Gamble who test a lot of different things. They recently patented a new consumer packaging, having very specific thermal properties measure with our instruments.”
Textiles however, is where C-Therm has made a name for itself.
“It feels like a major milestone. It’s something we’ve been working on since the beginning,” Harris says. There’s a sense of accomplishment with that, but it’s not one that we own ourselves. This specific effort was actually led by a research analyst in product innovation at Mark’s.”
About 95 per cent of C-Therm’s revenue are export based. Only around 35 per cent of that is to the United States.
“Over the last decade we spent a lot of effort on really developing distribution relationships with groups the represent our technology all around the world,” Harris says. “We have a very global outlook for a small company. We really don’t concern ourselves too much with the Canadian market.”
Harris says the places that spend the most on research & development in the world are countries like the U.S. and China. There are also the other countries like Germany and France, the U.K and Brazil where C-Therm has a presence. Harris says market diversification has been key to their success.
“In these countries we really focused on developing local distribution networks that know the local researchers and know our product and can be that point with the customer in promoting our solution to their challenges,” he says.
There are other companies out there that measure similar thermal properties, but like any successful company, C-Therm has managed to disrupt their market.
“We do it in such a unique way that we’ve really disrupted this space quite a bit by providing a much faster, easier technique and more versitile in terms of the types of samples you can measure,” Harris says.