Ellis Developments

Ellis Developments Limited

Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom

Ellis Developments provides innovative solutions for engineering and surgical problems using textiles. We also provide an expert witness service in most textile disciplines as well as independent consultancy and contract research.

Ellis Developments is a research and development textile company specialising in technical textiles.

Our technology is mainly in two areas, composites and medical textiles.

Technology developments include:

Embroidered surgical implants
Textile implants made by other textile processes.
Net shaped composite textile preforms in glass, carbon and other textile fibres
Hole reinforcement for composites
The use of biomedical inkjet printers to load cells, antibodies, proteins and enzymes onto textile substrates for surgical implants and tissue engineering in regenerative medical applications
Bio-absorbable and bioactive textile materials (absorbable by enzyme action rather than hydrolysis)
Through stitching of composite preforms and pre-impregnated textile preforms (pre-pregs)
Structural Health Monitoring of Composite Structures using sensors

We provide consultancy for projects in these and other textile areas, primarily for technical applications, as well as assistance with technical problems in most textile areas. The following pages describe these services in detail. We will always be pleased to hear from you by email, telephone or letter.

Ellis Developments is a textile technology company specialising in surgical implants and reinforcement for plastics (composite materials). Our areas of interest are particularly fibre placement technology and research and development into engineering textiles and textile surgical implants. The placement may be by embroidery, weaving, knitting, braiding or other methods most appropriate to the particular application. We also apply our specialist skills for other research and development work as well as for independent litigation support as expert witness in a very wide range of conventional textile disciplines.

We have prototyping and short run manufacturing facilities.

In the past, the company has won two SMART awards, and participated in a number of highly successful research projects.

We are partners in a series of projects to develop Spider-Like Silk for use as a material for surgical implants and and as a tissue engineering scaffold. This is in conjunction with University of Oxford and Oxford Biomaterials Ltd.

We were involved in a now completed major collaborative project to re-examine node and truss structures (such as used in the Wellington Bomber designed by Barnes Wallace) for aircraft manufacture, but using modern materials and methods. This project was a collaboration between Airbus and several companies and universities and demonstrated the potential for woven and embroidered structures for use in aircraft wing ribs. We have previously demonstrated a method of manufacturing wing spar preforms, ready for moulding.

We now have expertise in the placing of electrical sensors for the continuous monitoring of structural health in composite materials for aerospace, automotive and other applications, often where impact sensing is important.

We continue to develop textile techniques for a wide range of applications, and can offer improved methods for manufacture of carbon brakes, for example, for applications in implanting cells and growth factors into the body and other regenerative medicine applications.

We were involved in the world's first replacement of a collar bone, a claviculoplasty.

We have expertise in the through-stitching of structural components using CADCAM techniques for the improvement of impact resistance of aerospace components, (particularly to bird-strike) and sports and racing cars. We are even able to through-stitch pre-preg.

We are one of the UK's leading companies in innovative technical textiles