Best of the week — the five most popular stories among @AuManufacturing’s readers

What were the five biggest stories of the week? Here’s what visitors to this site were reading.

5) Hypersonix signs US agreement, could supply up to 20 DART AE platforms to Kratos

Brisbane-based hypersonic aircraft company Hypersonix Launch Systems and NASDAQ-listed Kratos Defense & Security Solutions have announced an “exclusive teaming agreement”, with Hypersonix to potentially supply up to 20 DART AE hypersonic systems within the US market, integrated with Kratos’s Zeus family of solid rocket motors.

DART AE is a three-metre-long, single-use, hydrogen-fuelled hypersonic platform, which will be additively manufactured out of high-temperature alloys. The company has previously contracted Amiga Engineering in Melbourne to additively manufacture its fifth-generation SPARTAN scramjet engine.

Hypersonix is also developing high-temperature ceramic matrix composite versions of its airframes and engines, with the former awarded support through Round 12 of the CRC-P program last year.

4) Defence calls for high volume local drone production

The Department of Defence has called for information and ideas leading to the development of a small, capable and genuinely sovereign drone system to be developed and manufactured in Australia.

The Department issued a Request For Information (RFI) which is an ‘industry engagement activity’ for the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA)’s first innovation challenge.

The ASCA replaced the former government’s defence innovation scheme the Defence Innovation Hub which was seen as isolated from the procurement function, with innovations funded by defence not leading to actual purchasing.

3) Ferndale Foods’ new $20m factory opens in Ballarat

Family owned confectioner and food manufacturer Ferndale Foods Australia has inaugurated its $20 million state-of-the-art food manufacturing facility in Ballarat, Victoria to produce ‘better for you’ bars and snacks.

Once fully operational, the new facility – the company’s third – to be known as FoodLine Australia will have the capacity to manufacture 180 million bars annually.

It will offer co-manufacturing capability to existing brands and customers such as Aldi supermarkets, while also creating its own ‘better for you’ product lines. FoodLine Australia plans to employ up to 30 people over the next 18 months.

2) Spotlight on scaleups: why more manufacturers need to grow up

In the first part of a two-part series we consider the importance of scaleup manufacturers. Brent Balinski spoke to some fast-growing manufacturers and other experts about the subject, including from Harvest B, Gilmour Space Technologies, and Breakthrough Victoria.

1) ResMed – from unwanted idea, to Peter Farrell’s great legacy

It was back in the 1980s in Sydney that I met an obscure professor of biomedical engineering from the University of New South Wales, Peter Farrell, writes Peter Roberts.

He had most recently headed the Baxter Centre for Medical Research in Australia and even then you could tell he was destined for something big – something which created a whole strand of medicine and demonstrated that global start ups could be founded and prosper from an Australian base.

Farrell always exuded an energy and optimism, and a knack for networking that was to set him in good stead when he took the company global.

And in case you missed our podcast…

In episode 67 of @AuManufacturing Conversations with Brent Balinski, Paul Hutchings from Fusion5 shares some observations from a long career in operations management, with some advice to nail change management as well as technology implementation during a rapid growth phase.

Picture: credit Ferndale Foods