Bright studs
Harding Electronics aims to brighten our journeys.
Friday, October 24 2003 || BY Kim Griggs
Its infancy was spent manufacturing the country’s first electronic knitting machines. Then came a halcyon period when it made and installed all of New Zealand’s traffic signals. Four decades later, Harding Electronic Systems, the descendant of that knitting machine company, is forging a new route, lighting up roadways around the world.
For the past five years, Harding has been selling powered road studs - road markings that can replace the reflective catseyes that Englishman Percy Shaw patented in 1935. The ‘smart’ studs use light-emitting diodes and a wireless power system to glow both day and night and in all weathers.
Co-owner and chief executive Tim Crabtree liked the technology so much he bought the business. Along with fellow shareholder Kent Robertson, Crabtree took over the company in March 2002 from former owner Viking Pacific Holdings.
The smart stud had its beginnings a decade ago when Clyde Mitchell, manager of engineering at Harding, approached The University of Auckland about the wireless power system - called inductive power transfer, or IPT - one of its teams was perfecting. IPT, developed by a group led by Professor John Boys, transfers power across an air gap. It’s the same principle that powers an electric toothbrush, but Boys’ team scaled it up to allow a magnetic field from a pair of wires buried beneath the road to power the light.
The IPT power system allows the studs to work day and night, and in weather that would defeat conventional reflective road markings, which need the beam of car lights to work. But with this added sophistication comes added cost. A ‘smart’ stud costs between $100 and $150 per stud, compared with just a few dollars for the reflective catseye.
While the idea for lights on roads has been around since the 1920s, it is only now - and especially after recent horrendous fires in vehicle tunnels - that the concept has started to catch on. Tunnels are a high priority, says Mitchell, and there’s increasing interest in using the studs for pedestrian crossings.
Since 1998, Harding has installed about 200 systems, including tunnels in Canada, Australia and Switzerland and more than a hundred pedestrian crossings in the US. The uses for the studs go beyond public roads - Hardings has sold ‘smart’ studs to Carter Holt Harvey to light access roads during foggy conditions at the Kinleith mill, and it’s negotiating with an oil company in Saudi Arabia to provide 40,000 studs to replace overhead lighting on refinery roads.
An earlier version of the smart stud was installed in Wellington’s Terrace tunnel in 1996. Stanley Chesterfield, Transit New Zealand road safety engineer for the Wellington region, says the studs resolved a major safety problem. “[When] you plunge into a tunnel, you plunge into the dark - and the brighter the day, the bigger the plunge. So for a short period of time you don’t know where you are. Having super-duper catseyes gets over the problem.”
But, aside from the Terrace and Lyttelton tunnels, the company has so far made little progress in getting road studs onto public roads in New Zealand. The Land Transport Safety Authority sees them as having specialist, rather than general, applications.
“There are quite specific areas where they are needed. Things like tunnels, areas where there may be problems with fog, and some specific areas where there is a lot of shading,” says LTSA senior engineer Bob Gibson. LTSA is, however, considering their use for delineating moveable lanes in areas such as the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
Hardings is the only New Zealand licensee of the Boys team’s IPT technology. UniServices, the university company responsible for commercialisation of research, says Harding has yet to generate a substantial royalty stream from the technology, but chief executive John Kernohan believes the outlook is good. “It looks like it’s going to be successful. It’s very encouraging.”
Harding’s commitment to its ‘smart’ products - the company also has a solar stud and a pad that senses pedestrians - has come at a financial cost so far. In the 2002/03 year the company failed to return a profit, despite turnover of $7.5 million. Harding’s domestic operations on their own (it also makes traffic products, road signs and safety equipment) would provide the company with a healthy balance sheet, but, says Crabtree, it has chosen to push funds into the development of its technology products.
And there appears to be good reason for Crabtree’s confidence in this strategy: turnover for this slice of the company has doubled each year for the past five years. In September the company shipped a single order of ‘smart’ studs worth $500,000, and so far this year it has traded profitably.
By next year the company aims to be producing ‘smart’ studs that are able to have the colour or intensity of their light changed remotely and at will. The technology, which the university has taken to proof of concept stage, could be used to ‘pulse’ the road lights - applications include signalling ways out of a tunnel in an emergency, or setting the speed limit on motorways. “It’s a technique that’s been used for training swimmers and sprinters, where you have a series of lights and they pace at the speed you want the person to run or swim. The same thing applies in terms of vehicles,” explains Crabtree.
It’s all a far cry from knitting machines - or is it? Crabtree: “In this industry...you’re not actually selling a product. You’ve got to sell the concept first.”