Design & Development
Within a few years of establishing PDM Neptec Ltd, the founder recruited a number of staff with a proven engineering background. This was partly due to his belief that good engineering skills are vital to support any production company but also that these skills would, through good production tooling design, give PDM Neptec an advantage in supplying the industry with superior quality, professionally designed and long-lasting cable assemblies.
Time has proven this strategy to be absolutely correct and over the years PDM has grown steadily maintaining a higher ratio of experienced engineering staff than one would expect to find in a company producing electrical cable harnesses. With such a solid engineering base, a natural progression in PDM's growth has been the ability to provide total solutions to clients' connector, cabling, and associated needs. Although many of our clients have their own design staff, PDM regularly design, manufacture and supply additional moulded, machined and fabricated assemblies to meet the requirements of a large part of a project, or even the whole project. This has been the case for some of the UK's major Companies and Organisations both within our industry and in associated industries. PDM has been involved in many prestigious projects, working to a documented quality system within its BS EN 9001:2008 accreditation for both design and manufacture.
PDM currently has five full time design engineers. They have a combined total of 135 years of design and manufacturing experience in underwater engineering from such diverse areas as atmospheric diving, remotely operated vehicles, deep sea photographic camera systems, bespoke housings for video cameras and instrumentation, and oceanographic sampling equipment. The engineers are also able to draw upon experience from other areas of manufacturing, with knowledge of hydraulics, pneumatics and injection moulding, which complements the existing in-house knowledge and experience base.
With such a strong engineering team, PDM has been able to develop its own range of successful hydrid electro-optic connectors with the added flexibility of supplying special hybrid connectors to meet clients' specific requirements. In recent years, PDM has also designed and manufactured many products that include the following:-
- Special electrical (including high voltage) connectors
- Water blocked penetrators
- Encapsulated sensors and transducers
- Instrumentation housings
- Cable bend control devices
- The Quickcure Moulding System for offsite cable repairs
- Remote encapsulated displays for re-breather diving equipment
The engineering design team continues to design all in-house tooling with the emphasis being on continual improvement. It has also undertaken a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between PDM and Portsmouth university that has investigated the industry problem of Cathodic Delamination of metal to Elastomer bonds. Follow-on research at PDM is now well advanced, under the control of the engineering department and significant progress enhancements are being introduced into PDM's production processes.
Aonther important service that the PDM engineering department offers is in providing clients with knowledgeable and practical advice on connector selection and usage issues. This service sometimes extends to providing a rapid response to clients experiencing installation or deployment issues.