Maybe, maybe not. Write to them on official university stationery
pleading your case. Imply that your thesis might uncover something
useful for them. Who knows, you might get a bunch of samples.
If it's just samples, he wants, the O.P. might have the best luck
approaching the National Distributor instead - being salespeople at heart
they tend to have quantitites of 'freebees' to give away with a little
justification; The manufacturer themselves are usually too large to bother
talking to you.
To approach a company as a student, it is best to be introduced by a
'connected' researcher or professor - most businesses have persistent
contacts with universities through a 'connected' person in the business but
it is often hard to see from the outside who to talk to and the majority of
the employees will not even know that there are such links.
The advantage is that many larger businesses have potential research
projects that nobody inside have the time or skills to carry out, so there
is potential for some serious work *if* one can get to the right person.
Here we have done a lot of work with system desing and evaluation using
Coloured Petri Nets, outsourcing most of the basic research work to Aarhus
University - there is a Free CPN tool from Aarhus University that is not so
hard to use, but still it takes time that the typical pointy-haired project
sponsor will deem wasted - especially if there are no major errors as a
result - because "then that job was too easy, you did not need those guys".
