Electro Recherche, the R&D tool of the Electropoli Group

Electro Recherche is located in Isigny-le-Buat (Manche departement). The small company with a staff of twelve is a subsidiary of the Electropoli group, the surface treatment specialist. Thierry Schmitz set up the small business in 1992. He now heads the firm and is in charge of the technical management of the group. Electro Recherche handles the studies and R&D for the entire Electropoli group.

With some 700 people working out of five locations, Electropoli earns a sales figure of 62 million, including 11% from exports. Its main market is the automotive industry accounting for 82% of its business and aeronautics covering the remaining 18%. In 1992, the authorities of the group, renowned mainly in the field of corrosion resistance, decided to set up an R&D structure. "We wanted to have an efficient R&D tool to continue rolling out the groups brand policy and engineer the developments needed to industrialize the products that can meet the expectations of our flagship manufacturers, i.e. automakers," summed up Thierry Schmitz, Electro Recherche Manager.
A laboratory with outstanding equipment
Today, Electro Recherche, which had a staff of two at startup, now boasts a team of twelve. "They are engineers or senior technicians who have moved on to in-house engineering positions. We recruit them mainly in Besançon and Reims where training in surface coatings is top quality," explained the Company Manager. Electro Recherche is constantly on the watch: technology watch, documentary watch, patent watch. Watch results are combined with the data on future automaker or aircraft manufacturer needs collected by the groups design and engineering office. "We cross-reference the different information we have and establish our research plan on this basis. The plan is then validated by the group," he pointed out.
Aside from its skilled workforce, the company also has major technical resources for characterizing the studied surface coatings and substrates. The Electro Recherche teams research also involves identifying the chemical compositions of surface coatings, measuring the inner constraints of material roughness or surface energy. For this purpose, the company has several kinds of equipment (scintillation spectrometer, glow discharge spectrometer, scanning electronic microscope coupled with an X-ray scanner, and so on) that are usually only owned by big laboratories. "We have worked with CETIM to develop graphic visualization software of current lines. Thanks to this kind of tool, surface treatment is now entering the modeling era," said Thierry Schmitz. He also explained that Electro Recherche is undoubtedly the only surface treatment company in the French industrial fabric to have such a well-equipped laboratory.
Different areas of Research
The companys main core skill is corrosion resistance, an area where Electro Recherche also has special testing facilities. "We are also working on natural corrosion with the Douai Ecole des Mines where we conduct site calibration comparisons. For instance, we expose our new surface coatings to the sea to observe their behavior," he explained. Electro Recherche usually works within a network of academic teams (Besançon University, the Brussels Université Libre, and others) through tendering or research contracts. It also works with private laboratories such as Ferrotec in the United States. Over the past year, a project for a thesis on the metallizing of plastics, conducted jointly with the CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission) was completed. "Now industrialization issues are posed for this research," said Electropolis Technical Manager. The Electro Recherche team conducts this part of the research whose findings are shelved pending their adjustment to customer demand.
The R&D company, which earns a turnover of some one million euros, is conducting research in different areas. The company engineers are working on hot galvanizing, a major focus at Electropoli. "This involves a thin galvanized coating process called GFE®, which we have developed for vehicle undercarriage. We keep perfecting the process every year to reach increasingly controlled thickness. Patents have been filed and licenses have been ceded for this research," explained the Electro Recherche Manager. He added that the company is now developing a highly sought-after dark GFE. A range of products called Zeltec® has also been engineered at the Electro Recherche laboratories. This process replaces extremely pollutant hexavalent chromium with other products while still maintaining highly efficient corrosion resistance properties. The Basse-Normandie team is now also working on Autrium, a project to plate aluminum parts with copper-nickel-chromium. "Actually, we are focussing on the engineering of any solution that can improve the surface properties of metallic or nonmetallic parts," summed up the Electro Recherche Manager.
Contact :,Electro Recherche - Thierry Schmitz, Manager,http://www.electropoli.com,Phone [phone]. Fax [phone] , ,Source : ScienceTech Basse-Normandie,http://www.basse-normandie.net/lettre/index_en.html

Pays

France