Cedrat Technologies is a company based in Meylan which makes innovation in the field of Mechatronics, which combines mechanics and electronics. It employs around sixty people, half of whom are engineers, and works in the fields of optics, defence, space and medicine. Cedrat technologie has also worked with Michelin to prevent heavy vehicle tire wear and has invented and patented the Quick Scan system.
France Bleu Isère: Frank Claeyssen, you are managing director of Cedrat Technologies, a company based in Meylan. You work in many fields: optics, medicine, space. But tell us today your story with Michelin and the creation of Quick Scan.
Frank Claeyssen: It started with a call from Thomas Ledoux, a young Michelin engineer with whom we had already worked. He said to me, Franck, do you have an idea to be able to measure the thickness of tire wear by a reader on the ground? Several innovative concepts have been proposed. For each type of tyre, we know the initial rubber thickness. Wear results in a loss of thickness by detection. We know that the tire is worn. Correlatively, Michelin has a whole system for tracing the trajectory of heavy goods vehicles in Europe and is able to associate a certain type of wear with a course, to know that such a road is more abrasive than another, for example. It gives them a very rich database. What kind of tires hold up well? What weather conditions? On what type of road? All in real time.
Does this only concern road professionals, namely road hauliers?
Yes ! Professionals, in fact, always have a place of repatriation, a base. And on Friday evening, they return to their parking lot. They pass a threshold on which there is a reading zone which allows them to record over a week what has happened in terms of wear.
And so it is interesting for the carrier, financially, but also in terms of the safety of its driver?
The tire is a really important safety device on wet roads, if the rubber is worn, it will brake less well. So it’s really fundamental to know the condition of the tire well. It also allows for scheduled maintenance. We don’t discover at the last moment that the tire is worn and that we have a problem. It is very important to optimize the proper use of the tire, that is to say not to change it too early or too late. The price of tires on trucks is a very significant budget compared to those of individuals. So it’s rational and it’s a gain in safety, comfort, organization, a financial gain for everyone on arrival. And we are also working on detection systems for aeronautics, to ensure, for example, that the wings of planes are not damaged, that the attachments of the reactor systems are in good condition. And for that, we also have a reader system that is under development. It can detect cracks and ensure that these cracks remain within reasonable sizes. Doing predictive maintenance is done within the framework of a European project called the MAP project.