Automation company opens Sci-Tech Daresbury site as new northern base
An automation specialist has opened an office at Sci-Tech Daresbury in an expansion into the North West.
Telford-based iconsys, a provider of integrated automation solutions, has taken office space at the Innovation Centre on campus, creating seven jobs.
Sci-Tech Daresbury, a joint venture between Langtree, Halton Borough Council, and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), hosts more than 150 high-tech businesses and is also the location of the UK’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to industrial R&D.
Nick Darrall, iconsys Managing Director, said: “Having a Northern office is very exciting and offers greater flexibility, allows for a more engaging experience for our existing talent living in and around the region, and opens up our talent pool to add to our growing team of ‘Best in Class’ engineers.
“This exciting new and innovative space offers a flexible, agile and enjoyable working environment, surrounded by nature, that will allow for co-working and collaboration and aids the learning of our people at all levels. We put our people at the core of everything we do.”
John Leake, Business Growth Development Director, Sci-Tech Daresbury, said: “We’re thrilled to welcome iconsys to our campus. Over recent years our campus has welcomed companies from North America, Australia and Hong Kong, but just as exciting for us is when a leading UK company decides to use our world class facilities as a new home for their operations.”
Recently iconsys was awarded a grant of nearly £1.7m by the Department for Transport for the next stage of development of a shore power system that aims to eliminate the operation of on-board diesel engines while ships are discharging marine aggregates.
Following the success of initial paper-based feasibility studies, iconsys is working in partnership with University of Warwick and building materials supplier CEMEX, to deliver an intelligently-managed shore power system demonstrator, specifically tailored to understand self-discharging commercial vessels’ demanding electrical load fluctuations.
It will incorporate battery energy storage and solar photovoltaic energy generation, plus integrated hardware-in-the-loop simulation to both virtually expand the capability of the system and validate modelling software predictions.
The Sci-Tech Daresbury campus is at the heart of ambitious plans for Liverpool City Region’s Life Sciences and Healthcare Investment Zone, which will see the campus expand its Violet series of buildings, bringing a further 80,000 sq ft of prime real estate to the North’s science and innovation offer in the form of two new three-storey buildings, known as V4 and V5.
The Investment Zone support will help towards ambitious plans to increase the number of people working on the campus from 2,000 to around 10,000 over the next 15-20 years.
