SA Branch Report

South Australian Branch Visits Defence Science and Technology’s Research Engineering Division

Source: Colin Hall

Defence is becoming a major focus for South Australia. The construction of the Hunter Class Frigates, the service life extension of the Collins Class submarines and the Future submarines are three majors programs—just to name a few.

The focus of the Defence Science and Technology (DST) group on the six new STaR Shot programs has also brought greater focus on research and force structure alignment (https://www.dst. defence.gov.au/strategy/star-shots). With this also comes the strategy of expanding DST’s collaborative effort with universities and industry partners. Underpinning this activity will be enhanced material science requirements—a perfect match with Materials Australia and its members.

The Materials Australia South Australia branch recently visited the Research Engineering department at Edinburgh. Research engineering delivers specialised engineering, design and fabrication solutions to DST, Defence and industry. Their areas of expertise are:

Electronic engineering and fabrication

• Complex electronic hardware design and fabrication

• Surface Mount Assembly Technologies

— automatic loading, assembly and inspection of printed circuit boards in prototype quantities • Software engineering with embedded or hosted software

• Firmware and printed circuit board design

Mechanical engineering and fabrication

• Complex mechanical engineering, design and fabrication • Design and development of complex electromechanical systems • Additive manufacturing — metallic and polymer 3D printing capability • 3, 4 and 5 axis simultaneous machining for complex geometries • Sheet metal, welding, model making and carpentry

Microengineering • Microfabrication

• Micro-packaging and metrology • Laser micromachining We spent around an hour touring their facilities, including their cleanroom facilities for their electronic fabrication processes and the additive manufacturing area with their extensive metal and plastic printing capability. It was a great tour that was enjoyed by all. We even left with a gift, the team had some bottle openers additively manufactured for us. Given the limitation to numbers we will look to run this visit again later next year. Above: A gift of an additively manufactured bottle opener. Below: SA branch members after the visit to DSTG

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