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Professor Bronwyn Fox is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) at Swinburne University of Technology. She spoke to William Poole. AMT: Swinburne has always been very active in the manufacturing space. What can you tell us about any projects and initiatives you’ve got on at the moment in that area? Bronwyn Fox: Well, Swinburne has a really deep history in manufacturing, and that comes from our founder, George Swinburne himself. He did a world tour in about 1897, where he travelled the world, looking at energy technologies. He went to the UK and the US and looked at gas and electricity, which were emerging as competitive technologies, and he realised that actually the solution would be to integrate the two systems. I think that that holistic approach of George Swinburne, to integrate different, seemingly competitive systems together to create a better outcome, is a part of our history and part of our DNA at Swinburne. So it’s really exciting to be here, it’s a very creative environment. Most recently, we’ve been really focused on our Industry 4.0 strategy. My former role was heading up Swinburne’s Manufacturing Futures Research Institute, and when we launched that in 2016, it was the first institute in Australia to focus on Industry 4.0. It raised a few eyebrows at the time – some people thought ‘Oh you know, this will never catch on’ – but it has turned out to be really ahead of its time. We could see what was happening in Europe. We could see this emerging trend of the digitisation of manufacturing and thought that it was such an opportunity for Australia and other developed economies. It brings us back into competition because it’s independent of labour costs, and yet it enables you to scale, which also creates more jobs at the same time. So a great opportunity for Australia. And since then we’ve worked with industry extensively: everything from the automotive sector to the aerospace sector, to the food and beverage industries. We’ve worked on new materials and photovoltaics, and looked at how digitalisation can transform these industries. It’s been a really fun and exciting adventure, and we’ve got a great team of researchers who are really industry-engaged and down to earth, and able to talk with industry and listen to them, hear their challenges and help solve problems for them. There’s also some really inspiring work being done around sustainability and the circular economy. One of our staff members, Dr Stacy Konash, works in our Factory of the Future facility, and she has actually been awarded a Fulbright fellowship to look at the circular economy in particular. I’ve been working with her on a project with a company called Mallinda in the US, who have an incredible technology for completely recycling carbon fibre composites. They have a resin system that can be completely recovered, as well as the fibre, which can be recovered in strips and continuous fibres, rather than having to be chopped up, where you lose the properties. To actually recover the fibre and the matrix is really hard, and that’s what this start-up Mallinda is able to do. AMT: Obviously the COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenging time. How has it affected Swinburne? BF: Every university is experiencing challenges, particularly with respect to our budgets, which have all dropped due to our inability to enrol international students, who have really brought so much to the diversity of our community and are such an important part of the
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fabric of our university and the way that we do research. So that’s been particularly challenging. What’s really inspired me is the resilience of our researchers and where they’ve been able to look at finding creative solutions. We’ve had researchers working on everything from developing a carbon fibre stretcher for carrying patients, to 3D printing copper door plates, because copper has been shown to be more resistant to viruses than other materials. One of my favourite projects involved an epidemiologist who got together with an astrophysicist at a coffee machine. Our leading epidemiologist Richard Osborne had come up with a very well thought-through questionnaire for tracing the transmission of influenza. He’d had that translated into more than 50 languages. And he bumped into Matthew Bailes, who being an astrophysicist is naturally au fait with data analytics and data visualisation, and he said: “Why don’t you create an app out of it?” Within 40 days they had held a hackathon and had a workable version of that. And I think it really will come into its own as we start to open up society more. It’s a symptom tracker where rather than just tracking the contacts of someone who’s been tested positive, you’re actually looking at the symptoms that are leading to that positive test. It’s a canary in the coalmine for COVID19 effectively. During the pandemic I’ve been hearing it from the manufacturing sector as well: so many different manufacturing companies who wouldn’t ordinarily work together getting together to find solutions and develop new technologies. And that’s really inspiring. I think the reason that it happens is it gives us a sense of agency, that there’s something that we can do to help rather than just sitting back passively. AMT: What are some of the most exciting developments that you’re currently seeing emerging in advanced manufacturing? BF: There’s some really incredible things. The first thing I need to talk about is the National Industry 4.0 Testlab in Composite Additive Manufacturing, our new joint facility with CSIRO. That will be on CSIRO’s Clayton campus, and the building is now almost completed. It will house a world-first process for additive manufacturing with carbon fibre composites. To me, that’s really super-exciting, and it’s at industrial scale. We can make parts that are 1.6 x 1.6m. To do that in partnership with the national science agency in Australia is so important. It gives us access to their depth and their national reach. The facility will not just allow us to rapidly prototype new materials, it will also allow us to push the boundaries of virtual commissioning, of the digitalisation of manufacturing, and of remote access to the facility. We’ll have CSIRO’s Data 61 team to look at the data analytics, the production data. How do we turn that into information? How do we create self-correcting processes? And how can we demonstrate the benefits of digitalisation to the broader manufacturing sector in Australia? One of the centrepieces is a process developed by a company called Fill, which is based in Gurten in Austria. It’s really beautiful: ‘The Sound of Music’ country, and you turn a corner and there’s an enormous factory that employs 700 people. Fill is the world leader in digitalisation: the company started from a family business that made
