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Business and Industry

Accelerators are a major tool for modern manufacturing, and a key technology for tackling the global challenges in healthcare, security, environment and energy. Each year, some €400bn of end products are produced, sterilized or examined using an industrial accelerator. The Cockcroft Institute works closely with industry to apply its knowledge, skills and facilities to industrial challenges, to ensure that the social and economic impacts from cutting-edge accelerator technologies are fully realised.

Future advances in accelerator technology will benefit many aspects of our everyday lives – through areas such as cancer treatment, security scanning, waste water treatment, industrial processing and advanced materials.

Our skills in the underpinning technologies of accelerator science have broad applicability, and we partner with a range of industries in these areas.

Work with us
The Cockcroft Institute partners have formalised a way of working to enable industry partners to quickly develop collaborations with the partnership. In the first instance please contact business@cockcroft.ac.uk.

Key technical areas include:

  • End-to-end accelerator expertise – ideas, design, modelling, build, commissioning, and operation
  • Radio frequency (RF) systems – optimised design of state of the art RF systems
  • Beam diagnostics – development, construction and operation of cutting edge beam instrumentation
  • Cryogenics – plant infrastructure and system optimisation
  • Lasers and THz
  • Vacuum technology – specialising in Ultra-High and Extreme High Vacuum (UHV and EHV) systems
  • Vacuum metrology and calibration service
  • Novel coatings for challenges including corrosion resistance, hardness, wear, catalytic performance, optical, electrical and magnetic properties
  • Surface analysis – expertise in a range of techniques that provide crucial information on materials at the fundamental level
  • Magnet technology – superconducting and normally conducting, from design and modelling through to testing and operation
  • Beam modelling and simulation


We have a range of accelerator test facilities, including VELA (Versatile Electron Linear Accelerator), specifically designed to boost development of advanced accelerator systems.

More information about the business support activities of the STFC Accelerator Department ASTeC may be found at:
https://www.astec.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Business-Support.aspx

Topics

  • Diagnostics / D-BEAM

    Coming Soon!.

  • Proton beam therapy

    Coming Soon!.

  • Rapiscan cargo scanning

    Coming Soon!.

  • Linacs for Africa

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    Designing new radiotherapy technologies to treat cancer in low and middle-income countries

    A new project supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) aims to design and develop new radiotherapy technologies to give more cancer patients in Sub-Saharan Africa access to treatment and to save lives.

    The project, ‘Innovative Technologies towards building Affordable and equitable global Radiotherapy capacity’ (ITAR), will contribute to the development of novel radiotherapy machines, specifically designed to meet the needs of African hospitals.

    The challenge brings together an international team of accelerator physicists and engineers, medical physicists, radiobiologists, radiation oncologists, radiologists, IT experts, and health system researchers.

    The annual global incidence of cancer is projected to rise to 27.5 million cases by 2040, leading to more than 13 million deaths. Up to 70 per cent of these will occur in low and middle-income countries (LMICs).

    Radiotherapy is an essential component of cancer care being a very effective means of curing the disease, as well as palliative treatment, and where available, is used to treat more than half of patients.

    Many low and middle-income countries in Africa have acute shortages of radiotherapy machines. In the lowest income countries only four percent of cancer patients that need radiotherapy treatment are able to be treated.

    There are currently only 385 radiotherapy machines in the region, and 60 percent of those are located in just three countries – South Africa, Egypt and Morocco.

    A report by the Lancet Oncology Commission - Global Task Force on Radiotherapy for Cancer Control (GTFRCC) of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) recently estimated that by 2035 at least 5,000 additional megavolt-class treatment machines would be needed to meet radiotherapy demands in low-and middle-income African countries.

    In ITAR’s first phase, the project will define the persistent shortfalls in basic infrastructure, equipment and specialist workforce which remain barriers to effective radiotherapy delivery, and develop novel solutions leading to a detailed specification and conceptual design. The project will then progress to a prototype development phase at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory.

    The ITAR project, a critical part of a larger international project that includes the International Cancer Expert Corps (ICEC), CERN, STFC (Daresbury Laboratory), and Lancaster University, is led by Lancaster University and Oxford University, and will bring together partners from the Cockcroft Institute, STFC’s Accelerator Science and Technology Centre (ASTeC), John Adams Institute, Swansea University, King’s College London, ICEC and CERN.

    Professor Manjit Dosanjh, from CERN and Oxford University, and member of the ICEC Board of Directors, and who leads the overall international project, said: “I am really excited that the idea, first presented by Dr Norman Coleman of the International Cancer Expert Corps at the 2014 ICTR-PHE meeting held in Geneva, continues to flourish. Having Lancaster and Oxford Universities, along with Daresbury Laboratory and others working on this with STFC’s critical support and ICEC’s expertise, is a significant step in addressing the need for a novel medical linear particle accelerator to generate the radiation for LMICs and other challenging environments.”

    A critical aspect of the project’s challenge cluster is the involvement of the international partners. Dr Taofeeq Ige and Dr Simeon Aruah, of the National Hospital Abuja, Nigeria, and Dr Surbhi Grover, of the Botswana-UPENN Partnership and Princess Marina Hospital, are key partners working in African hospitals. They will gather information from a network of other hospitals in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe and play a key role in the definition of the specification for the new machines.

    In addition, ICEC provides a network of international oncologists, medical physicists, and engineers working in radiotherapy systems. They are already providing training and mentorship in lower-middle income countries and will continue with their assistance in the development of the radiotherapy system in this project.

    Professor Graeme Burt, of Lancaster University and the Cockcroft Institute, and who is leading the phase 1 project said: “Current radiotherapy machines are optimised for use in western countries. The ITAR project aims to design specifically for use in Africa making it far more tolerant to the local environment, which will greatly increase the capacity for more lives to be saved.”

    Professor Deepa Angal-Kalinin, of STFC and the Cockcroft Institute, University of Manchester, and who is leading the accelerator design said: “I am keen to apply the knowledge and expertise at Daresbury Laboratory to develop a novel medical linac design in this phase of the project which will prepare us to build a prototype to test our novel ideas.”

  • VHEE with Elekta

    Coming Soon!.

  • Space radiation testing with plasma

    Coming Soon!.

  • RELIEF leather irradiation

    Coming Soon!.

  • Waste water treatment

    Coming Soon!.

  • Waters mass spectrometry

    Coming Soon!.

  • RF source development with e2v-teledyne and TMD at Strathclyde

    Coming Soon!.

Recent News

  • Cockcroft Institute book released as a broad introduction to particle accelerators
  • What would you do with a mini accelerator?

News and Events Calendar

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Latest News

  • Cockcroft Institute book released as a broad introduction to particle accelerators
  • What would you do with a mini accelerator?
  • Cockcroft Institute awarded more than £11 million to boost accelerator research
  • Healthcare Instrumentation Workshop

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Recent Events

Healthcare Instrumentation Workshop
Feb 10, 2021
Register now: national particle accelerator open day
Jan 15, 2021
PhD students engage in online training on Data Intensive Science
Nov 12, 2020

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