IAV Engineering Ltd was founded in 1997 in Ecublens by Vincent Chritin, with Eric Van Lancker joining him from the second year onwards, as a spin-off from EPFL’s electromagnetic and acoustic laboratory. After winning the BVC foundation’s scientific innovation prize in 1998 (FIT), they created a limited liability company with a cumulated turnover of approximately 20 MCHF in 2013 (1.83 MCHF in 2013).

Incarnated by it’s founding tandem Vincent Chritin – Eric Van Lancker, IAV nowadays is an ultra-specialized acoustic and vibratory engineering company. It develops, in a very wide scope, the acoustics’ and vibrations’ capacity to produce useful effects or to provide information on phenomena.

Their areas of expertise are sensing, analysis, diagnosis, quality and quality control, surveillance, detection, localization and recognition.

The company’s main characteristics consist in their unique approach that is tirelessly orientated towards improving means of observation and analysis and the implementation of solutions with a level of technical integration that are rare for a structure of IAV’s size. Furthermore, it’s proximity to large companies, institutional laboratories and high performing smaller businesses as well as a culture of excellence and functional coherence have allowed IAV to progressively build a specific network of competences: software engineering and system design, electronics, instrumentation, signal processing, industrial design and embedded systems).

During it’s first decade the young company realized approximately 300 projects, 2/3 of which involved the industry, thus creating a renowned customer-base. 2005 saw the start of a second period of strong, long-term, exclusive partnerships in particular with a world-wide industrial group (ABB, active noise control), three major industrial watch-makers (R&I acoustics), military research ISR (Intelligent Surveillance and Recognition). Furthermore it continued the incessant development of innovative environmental acoustic solutions, in particular the implantation of IAV’s acoustic sensors at all latitudes and altitudes, including Antarctica and the Himalaya.

From the very beginning IAV strives towards creating solutions in environmental surveillance (in particular in meteorology and natural dangers), starting with FlowCapt, a measuring sensor for snow flow transported by wind. This sensor being essential in avalanche management, it is now integrated in international climatological research. This patented sensor, although it’s a niche instrument, has become a world-wide reference and forms the basis of the commercialization of two varieties the market of this technology has been waiting for, the acoustic rain gauge RainFlow as well as the « sand » version of the FlowCapt original sensor.

Created in 2005 in order to distinguish itself from the main engineering consultancy activity, the ISAW division regroups most of the products developed by IAV, as well as the services associated to these products, more specifically the on-line consultation of the data generated by the exploitation of these systems in different collaboration frameworks with final clients or for research requirements.

Vincent Chritin and Eric Van Lancker both have obtained their PhD at EPFL, in applied acoustics for the former and in signal treatment for the latter. They accumulate, between the two of them, more than 15 patents and about fifty scientific and technical publications. They are constantly engaged in high-level industrial and institutional collaborations. They willingly maintain the IAV company at a confidential size, which allows them to stay “at the heart of the subject” as well as in a direct personal relationship with all the company’s interlocutors. This original operating mode is based on a network of independent experts, a total of about twenty very specific and complementary people and corporations, that has largely proven it’s efficiency and reactivity.

Since 2013 the company is located in it’s own building in Tannay on the Lake Geneva shore. The surface of 250m2 is essentially occupied by a laboratory dedicated to acoustics, vibrations and signal processing.