The Blue Economy CRC and Perth-based Carnegie Clean Energy are working to develop a new mooring tensioner, a key component of the company’s wave energy generators (pictured below). The project, led by Carnegie CTO Alexandre Pichard, aims to support the use of rotary power take-off systems, bringing down the cost of wave energy conversion. The…
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) is backing startup business SunDrive in a $9 million effort to commerialise its low cost, high efficiency solar photovoltaic (PV) cell manufacturing process in Australia. ARENA’s $3 million in funding will also scale the technology up from an industrial sized cell to a commercial size module that could be…
Shoppers once selected grocery products based simply on price or brand, but now attributes such as “climate-friendly” or “eco-friendly” are part of the consideration.
The hope that the Covid-19 pandemic will bring some good by forcing companies to re-engineer supply chains from overseas to local sources is real, according to electronics manufacturer and assembler Circuitwise Electronics Manufacturing. While local manufacturers turned to the half dozen large Australian printed circuit board makers at the height of pandemic disruption, the first…
A total of 373,000 industrial robots were sold in 2019, according to newly-released figures, with two-thirds of all new units sold in the Asia region.
By RMIT Advanced Manufacturing Precinct and Centre for Additive Manufacture The 4th International Forum on Additive Manufacturing, delivered virtually on 9 September, 2020 in Melbourne, Australia proved by all accounts to be a great success. The Forum general chair Professor Milan Brandt of the Centre for Additive Manufacturing, RMIT University attracted a number of international,…
By Peter Roberts Standing in front of Chateau Tanunda in the Barossa Valley yesterday hit home a lesson of the past – where there is trouble, there is also opportunity. The Château’s origins go back to the decimation of Europe’s, and Australia’s eastern states’ vineyards by the fungal root disease phylloxera in the 19th century.…
Advanced Composite Structures has delivered a composite hydro-electric turbine blade (pictured above, and below) to renewables and hydro power developer, Kinetic NRG. ACS Australia designed and manufactured the cost-effective and light-weight solution, replacing a proposed metallic turbine blade design which could not be manufactured to meet the required dimensional accuracy. The Port Melbourne company developed…
ASX-listed First Graphene has announced a successful trial of graphene powders incorporated into composite construction materials with collaborator Ascent Shipwrights. According to the Perth-based graphene supplier, initial test work incorporating different proportions of graphene at 0.25, 0.5 and 1 per cent into a fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) laminate showed improvements in ultimate flexural strength. …
By Grahame Lynch The federal government will today announce an ambitious plan to make point-to-point fibre-on-demand services available to 700,000 businesses across 240 zones, including 85 in regional Australia. The government estimates this will reach 90 per cent of Australian businesses. The plan will also see Enterprise Ethernet products offered to regional businesses at Zone…
