People
Managing Director — Alan Foster
A founding director of the business in 1979 and Managing Director since 1995, Alan has been a LIM design engineer since 1975.
Alan has amassed a vast wealth of knowledge and experience on all the aspects of the technical and commercial usages of LIMs. Alan has custom designed LIMs, control systems and architectural aspects of applications for many clients across a huge variety of industrial and commercial uses including roller coaster launchers, baggage handling and conveying systems, personal rapid transit systems, and medical equipment.
An experienced and practical engineer, Alan has also been the driving force behind the continued success of the business into its 30th year of operation.
Technical Director — Jeff Proverbs
A LIM design engineer since 1975, Jeff also had project management experience on large electrical engineering schemes before joining the company in 1990.
As Technical Director, Jeff has extensive knowledge and experience of many varied industrial and commercial LIM applications. He is responsible for evaluating the application of LIM technology to future applications as well as completing detail design evaluation and refinements on the new and existing motors using extensive computer modelling techniques and practical testing.
Another experienced and practical engineer, Jeff will assist customers in optimising their system to exploit the many advantages LIMs offer.
Operations Director — Neil Foster
Neil is responsible for commercial and production aspects of the business, joining the business in 2008 to having spent the previous 9 years working in a large, global company in commercial and human resources capacities, dealing with high volume daily operations and long term, large scale project management.
Chief Controls Engineer & Quality Assurance — Steve Colyer
A thorough and exacting engineer, Steve has worked with electrical and electronic control systems for LIMs and other special purpose electromagnetic equipment since 1975 giving him unique knowledge and expertise in both LIM and system control design.
He has extensive site experience of application implementation, control system testing and automated data collection for evaluation.
Steve is also responsible for the design and maintenance of our own rigorous QA system ensuring our products perform perfectly first time and every time.
Senior Project Engineer — Dr Tom Cox
Tom has been with the business since 2004, most of which was spent working with the University of Bath on Linear Machines Development. He completed his Doctorate in novel linear induction machines in 2009 and is working alongside Jeff to develop and apply novel linear motor technologies throughout the company.
Project Engineer — Matt Dickinson
Matt joined the company in 2009 having graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Matt's mechanical knowledge will transfer across to product design and development and also production methodology giving Force an even wider skill-base.
Production Staff
We have over 15 dedicated production staff, all trained and skilled in manufacturing LIMs to our exacting standards. A number of staff focus on specialist areas of production whilst others are multi-skilled and are able to move from area to area as production requirements change.
Academic Consultants
Prof. Fred Eastham
Professor Eastham is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
He has been actively engaged in the general field of electrical machines research for over 50 years with an emphasis on novel topologies. He is widely regarded as one of the leading experts in the field of linear machines and has 75 publications and patents in the area.
In addition to many industrial consulting appointments, he was a main board member of the Mycalex Group Company and appointed to the Register of Independent Members of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council (DSAC).
Dr. Denis Edwards
Before joining the University of Sussex, Dr Edwards was a development engineer in the Medium Machines Engineering Department at AEI (Rugby).
Following research on induction motors and linear reluctance motors, he joined the Sussex team working on a NASA project for electromagnetically assisted launching of spacecraft, where he worked on the modelling and design of the levitation and propulsion systems.
He has written user documentation for Infolytica Corporation, specialists in design and analysis software for electromagnetics.