Sheffield industrial sensing company Tribosonics has appointed Jocelyn Clarke as chief finance and operations officer as it moves its flagship acoustoSENSE™ technology from certification into volume production.

Clarke joins the board and will lead finance, operations, people and culture, and IT; bringing more than 20 years of director-level experience at high-growth technology businesses. She studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and qualified as a chartered accountant with Deloitte in London in 2000, then moved into industry two years later.

Clarke has since held CFO, COO and HR leadership roles at companies including Radar Healthcare, DrDoctor, Airship, Optimal Technologies, Transversal and VeryPC.

She said: “I have spent most of my career helping companies build the foundations and the rigour that support scale.

“Tribosonics has the customers, the product, the certifications. What matters now is the engine behind them: the planning, the controls, the production discipline and the people.”

acoustoSENSE is a battery-powered, wireless acoustic-emissions monitoring system. It gives operators continuous, real-time visibility of critical assets such as pressure relief devices and slow-rotating bearings, so they can catch leaks and mechanical wear before they turn into failures.

The system holds ATEX, IECEx and UL intrinsically-safe certification, which means it can be used in hazardous areas worldwide. One offshore operator using it is targeting a 65 per cent cut in pressure safety valve maintenance costs.

Chief executive Mark Wallace said the appointment marked a deliberate shift “from proving the product to scaling it”. He added that Clarke would sharpen how the business plans, forecasts and controls spending as it moves into volume delivery.

Chair Pete Skipworth described her breadth of experience as “unusual, and exactly what a company at this point needs”.

Clarke is the second board appointment at Tribosonics in three months. Peter Collins, former chief executive of Permasense, joined as a non-executive director in July.

The hires follow a period of commercial growth for acoustoSENSE across oil and gas, petrochemical and process applications.