Edge of Tomorrow: Science and Engineering Research at Curtin University

TOMORROW

EDGE OF

SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING RESEARCH AT CURTIN UNIVERSITY

RESEARCH FRONTIERS New collaborations in energy, water and astronomy

FIELDS OF THE FUTURE

Translating research from lab to farm

TRACING ANCIENT CHANGE Tiny crystals revealing Earth’s tumultuous past

SMALL-SCALE REVOLUTIONS

How nanotechnology will transform our world

research.curtin.edu.au

Make tomorrow better.

CRICOS Provider Code 00301J CU-UM000170 Curtin University is a trademark of Curtin University of Technology.

FOREW0RD

CURTIN’S UNIQUE VISION As Western Australia’s largest and most culturally diverse university, and with Australia’s third largest international student population, Curtin University is a leader in science and engineering research and international collaboration

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T’S NOT HARD TO SEE WHY universities are paramount to our future. Aside from training tomorrow’s skilled visionaries, they are the hotbed for research that will alter the way we understand the world tomorrow, and how we manage it today.

Universities are collaborative institutions – of ideas, skills and facilities. They are spaces where a walk across the park can bring you into contact with someone working on the next stage of a problem – the story of Earth’s ancient past, for example, or the development of fungicide resistance. Conversations in this space can take research from concept to commercial practice.

Collaborations reach beyond university boundaries – to nearby institutions, to regional centres of excellence, and across the globe to far-flung industries and academics.

This research guide focuses on some of the major research strengths in institutes, departments and centres in science and engineering at Curtin University, with news, feature articles and profiles

highlighting new and ongoing research initiatives, and revealing Curtin’s unique strengths, facilities and capabilities in science and engineering.

For Curtin University, the elements of success include a strong commitment to international engagement and building world-class capability in Research and Development through strategic alliances and partnerships. The point of research is to make the world a better place and this publication shows a few of the ways in which researchers at Curtin University are addressing major issues around minerals and energy, ICT and emerging technologies, health and sustainable development.

Curtin’s research capabilities are ranked as world-class level or above in 35 of the 49 fields assessed by Excellence in Research Australia, many of these in science and engineering disciplines that address world issues.

Humanity’s future prosperity and, indeed, survival is a global quest, and we’re proud to be part of it.

– Professor Andris Stelbovics, Pro Vice-Chancellor n

Researchers at Curtin University are addressing major issues around minerals and energy, ICT and emerging technologies, health and sustainable development.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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CONTENTS

FEATURES

8 When Worlds Collide

30 Fuelling the Future

Communication, genetics expertise and on-the-ground knowledge help distinguish the research outcomes of Curtin’s Centre for Crop and Disease Management

The complex engineering driving renewable energy innovation, global satellite navigation, and the new science of industrial ecology is among Curtin’s acknowledged strengths

36 Small Scale, Big Consequences

The multidisciplinary team at Curtin University’s Nanochemistry Research Institute examines the world on an atomic and subatomic level to solve major problems

44 Across the Skies The engineering challenges behind building the world’s biggest radio telescope are vast, but bring rewards beyond a better understanding of the universe

Edge Of Tomorrow

A suite of high-precision instruments and global collaborations are creating an innovation hub at Curtin, where engineering and science researchers partner with industry

Curtin University geoscientists use cutting-edge techniques to tell the story of Earth’s ancient past – with valuable implications for the present day

22 Saving Grains

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14 Growth Factor

40 Oceans of Wealth

Australia is the driest inhabited continent, but fringed by huge expanses of ocean. Curtin is supporting crucial research in managing precious water resources

PROFILES

NEWS

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18

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26

Molecular Detective: Professor Kliti Grice

A Remarkable Career: Professor Simon Wilde

Supercontinent Revolution: Professor Zheng-Xiang Li

Foundations for Success: Professor Richard Oliver

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48

Building a Dream: Professor Zongping Shao

Smarter Separation: Professor Shaomin Liu

Immense Vision: Professor Steven Tingay

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20

Shark Detection

Reading Vision

Optimal Solutions

Desert Fireballs

Measuring Change

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27

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34

Out of This World

Tracing Change

Fire and Ice

Big Data Solves Global Issues

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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NEWS

SHARK DETECTION SHARKS HAVE AN INCREDIBLE sense of smell, but it is their sense of hearing that could be one of the keys to protecting people at beaches, says a team of researchers led by Dr Christine Erbe from Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology.

“We had this idea of trying to figure out what acoustic signatures humans make, whether the sharks can hear them, and, if appropriate, whether we can somehow interrupt that,” says Erbe. These interruptions could then potentially be used to ‘hide’ or ‘mask’ the noises people make in the water from the sharks.

Western Australia is a pertinent place to work on this project, given the debate over baited drum lines to cull sharks, and the project has been funded by Western Australia’s Department of Commerce.

Initial recordings have been made of people in a pool swimming and snorkelling past a hydrophone – a microphone designed to record or listen to underwater sound. Erbe’s team records people

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swimming and surfing at beaches to see how far their noises travel. These sounds can then be played to sharks in enclosures at Ocean Park Aquarium in Shark Bay to check for any responses.

“If we see responses from the sharks, the next step is to figure out if we can mask the sounds of people in the water using artificial signals,” says Erbe. These artificial signals are band-limited white noise, created digitally. “We can see which frequencies, or part of the human sound signature, could be detected by the sharks and calculate the range limits at which that might occur. We can then design masking signals that fill in around them so those frequencies can’t be detected,” she says. The team will test these masking signals by playing them back to the sharks at Ocean Park Aquarium.

This masking technique is different to other approaches where loud sounds are played at beaches to scare sharks away. The problem with the loud sound approach, says Erbe, is that it potentially interferes with an entire

underwater ecosystem. The masking approach, on the other hand, is targeted at frequencies and levels that only sharks can hear in the surf zone. “We’re not looking at scaring the sharks away, we’re just limiting them from detecting humans,” she says.

According to Erbe, a multidisciplinary approach is crucial to solving problems such as shark mitigation, and her team ranges from physicists to acousticians, engineers and marine biologists.

Team member Dr Miles Parsons is leading another project on the sonar detection of sharks with the aim of building an early warning system. “The solution will have to be a combination of detecting sharks and preventing them detecting us,” says Erbe. – Ruth Beran n

Inset above: The outline of a shark shows clearly on a scanner used by the Curtin team.

READING VISION DIGITAL READING SOFTWARE for vision-impaired people costs around $400 and can only verbalise text. Senior Lecturer Dr Iain Murray and PhD student Azadeh Nazemi of Curtin University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have designed a new system that enables vision-impaired people to also access information from images – for $100.

The device is 3 cm thick and about the size of an iPad, with built-in speakers and navigation buttons. Nazemi says it was a challenge to combine several existing technologies into one system that could recognise patterns, segment them into pieces of interest, interpret information and describe it in an audio format.

“In a line graph, for example, the machine has to work out where the axes are, conduct optical character recognition on the labels and legends, match it all together and calculate, in human terms, what the

lines mean: Are they heading up? Is there a change at a certain point?” Nazemi says.

The device can read any electronic document via a USB memory stick and can also download books from the library.

In addition, its voice-activation feature works in more than 120 languages.

“Our system is easily operated by people of all ages and abilities, and it is open source so anyone can use and modify the software,” Murray says.

With more than 20,000 people in Western Australia alone who are legally blind, and at least 285 million vision-impaired people worldwide, a user-friendly system that can interpret complex visual information will have a profound impact.

“We believe the biggest difference will be in countries such as Africa, India and China because demand is high and our devices are affordable,” says Murray.

– Branwen Morgan n

MEASURING CHANGE USING A COMBINATION of satellite data and ground observations, spatial scientists are able to measure water use, land changes and climate variability with greater accuracy than ever before. Professor of Geodesy Will Featherstone at Curtin is measuring the rate at which land in Perth is sinking due to water drawn from the city’s underground aquifers.

“As the water gets pulled out, the weight of the rocks on top causes the land to subside,” he says. “We’re using satellite techniques, GPS, plus a radar technique called InSAR, where we take a radar picture of Perth every 11 days. We stack all these images together to deduce the subsidence.”

The study is also being used to correct records of sea level rise in Perth, which have been exaggerated in some places because of the sinking land. The team is also working further afield, using precision satellite measurement techniques to stave off conflict over water distribution in Northeast Africa.

Using data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, spatial scientist Associate Professor Joseph

Awange has been able to show that between 2002 and 2011, Egypt over-extracted water from the Nile Basin for irrigation purposes.

The satellite data also showed a sharp drop in rainfall across the region in November and December 2010 and a decline in rainfall over the 10-year study period in the Ethopian Highlands.

Awange says measuring water use in the Nile Basin can determine if countries are abiding by the 1929 Nile Water

Agreement to share the world’s longest river.

Analysing satellite data could show which countries are over-extracting water from the Nile. “If the upstream countries use a lot of the water, then the chance is that the downstream countries such as Egypt will not have enough to sustain them,” says Awange.

“Egypt has threatened several times that they’re ready to go to war if the upstream countries extract more than is necessary,” he says. – Michelle Wheeler n

Curtin scientists used the GRACE satellites to measure data on water usage in the Nile Basin from 2002 to 2011.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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GEOLOGY

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

Curtin University geoscientists use cutting-edge techniques to tell the story of Earth’s ancient past – with valuable implications for the present day

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OLLECTING ROCK SAMPLES at 5200 m on a recent trip to the Tibetan Plateau, Professor Simon Wilde, from the Department of Applied Geology at Curtin University, was pleased to have avoided the symptoms of altitude sickness. The last time he conducted fieldwork in a similar environment had been about 20 years before in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, and he’d managed then to also avoid altitude headaches. Nonetheless, he says, Tibet was tough. Due to the atmospheric conditions, the Sun was intensely strong and hot but the ground was frozen. “It’s a strange environment,” he says.

Wilde was invited by scientists at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to collect volcanic rock samples at the Tibetan site. The region is geologically significant because it is where the Indian tectonic plate is currently “driving itself under the Eurasian plate”, he explains. During their recent field trip, Wilde and his Chinese colleagues collected about 100 kg of rocks, which were couriered back to Guangzhou and Curtin for study. The researchers will be drawing on a variety of geochemistry techniques to analyse the material as they try to paint a picture of what happens when two continents collide, gaining insight into the evolution of Earth’s crust.

“We’re trying to unravel a mystery in a sense,” says Wilde. “We don’t have the full information, so we’re trying to use everything we can to build up the most likely story.”

The Guangzhou geochemists will be analysing trace elements in the rock samples to uncover information about their origins and formation. Back at Curtin, Wilde is working on determining the age of zircon crystals collected from the site, using a technique called isotopic analysis. This involves measuring the ratios of atoms of certain elements with different numbers of neutrons (isotopes) to reveal the age of crystals based on known rates of radioactive decay.

It’s work that’s providing a clearer picture of Earth’s early crustal development and is an area in which Wilde is internationally renowned (see profile, p18).

Gaining an idea of the past distribution of Earth’s continental crust has implications for the resources

sector, Wilde explains. “It’s important for people working in metallogeny [the study of mineral deposits] to see where pieces of the crust have perhaps broken off and been redistributed,” he says. “There could be continuation of a mineral belt totally removed and on another continent.”

COPPER IN DEMAND

Professor Brent McInnes, Director of the John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research, is also interested in the collision of tectonic plates – to help supply China’s increasing demand for domestic copper. “The rapid urbanisation of China since the 1990s has created a significant demand for a strategic supply of domestic copper, used in air conditioners, electrical motors and in building construction,” explains McInnes. Most of the world’s supply of copper comes from a specific mineral deposit type known as porphyry systems, which are the exposed roots of volcanoes formed during tectonic plate collisions.

McInnes’ research involves taking samples from drill cores, rock outcrops and mine exposures in mountainous regions around the world to be studied back in the lab. Specifically, he and his research team are able to elucidate information about the depth, erosion and uplift rate of copper deposits using a technique called thermochronology – a form of dating that takes into account the ‘closure temperature’, or temperature below which an isotope is locked into a mineral. Using this information, scientists can reveal the temperature of an ore body at a given time in its geological history. This, in turn, provides information with important implications for copper exploration, such as the timing and duration of the mineralisation process, as well as the rate of exposure and erosion.

“Institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences have been awarded large research grants to investigate porphyry copper deposits in mountainous terrains in southern and western China, and have sought to form collaborations with world-leading researchers in the field,” says McInnes.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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GEOLOGY

INTERPRETING SPECIES LOSS

We’re trying to unravel a mystery, in a sense. We don’t have the full information, so we’re trying to use everything we can to build up the most likely story.

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Professor Kliti Grice, founding Director of the WA-Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre, researches mass extinctions. As an organic and isotope geochemist, Grice (see profile, p12) studies molecular fossils in rock sediments from 2.3 billion years ago through to the present day, also known as biomarkers. These contain carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, or sulphur – unlike the rocks, minerals and trace elements studied by inorganic geochemists Wilde and McInnes.

Grice uses tools such as tandem mass spectrometry, which enables the separation and analysis of ratios of naturally occurring stable isotopes to reconstruct ancient environments.

For example, carbon has two stable isotopes – carbon-12 and carbon-13 – and one radioactive isotope, carbon-14. The latter is commonly used for dating ancient artefacts based on its rate of decay. A change in carbon-12 to carbon-13 ratios in plant molecules, however – along with a change in hydrogen – can reveal a shift in past photosynthetic activity.

Grice has uncovered the environmental conditions during Earth’s five mass extinction

events and has found there were similar conditions in the three biggest extinctions – the end-Permian at 252 million years ago (Ma), end-Triassic at 201 Ma and end-Devonian at 374 Ma. Among other things, there were toxic levels of hydrogen sulphide in the oceans. Grice discovered this by studying molecules from photosynthetic bacteria, which were found to be using toxic hydrogen sulphide instead of water as an electron donor when performing photosynthesis, thereby producing sulphur instead of oxygen.

“The end-Permian and end-Triassic events were almost identical in that they are both associated with massive volcanism, rising sea levels and increased run-off from land, leading to eutrophication,” Grice explains. Eutrophication occurs when introduced nutrients in water cause excessive algal growth, reducing oxygen levels in the environment. “There were no polar ice caps at these times, and the oceans had sluggish circulations,” she adds.

In 2013, Grice co-authored a paper in Nature Scientific Reports documenting that fossils in the Kimberley showed that hydrogen sulphide plays a pivotal role in soft tissue preservation. This

ANCIENT DNA UNRAVELS GREAT MOA MYSTERY

modern day insight is valuable for the resources sector because these ancient environments provided the conditions for many major mineral and petroleum systems. “When you have these major extinction events associated with low oxygen allowing the organic matter to be preserved – along with certain temperature and pressure conditions over time – the materials break down to produce oil and gas,” Grice says.

For example, the Permian-Triassic extinction event – during which up to 95% of marine and 70% of terrestrial species disappeared – produced several major petroleum reserves. That includes deposits in Western Australia’s Perth Basin, says Grice, “and probably intervals in the WA North West Shelf yet to be discovered.”

– Gemma Chilton n

CURTIN RESEARCH has confirmed that moas – huge flightless birds endemic to New Zealand – were driven to extinction by the arrival of humans on the islands.

There were once nine moa species, with the biggest up to 20 kg and standing 3.5 m tall. Past research has suggested that large declines in moa populations occurred before Polynesians arrived in New Zealand around 1300 AD, but new evidence is providing fresh insight into the disappearance of this ancient megafauna.

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2014, a team led by Professor Michael Bunce, head of Curtin’s Trace and Environmental DNA Laboratory, reported on research into the gene pools of four moa species during the 4000 years before they went extinct.

“The DNA helix is a stable molecule that is preserved long after the death of an organism,” explains Bunce, whose research team isolated and radiocarbon-dated DNA from 250 excavated moa bone samples, then amplified the degraded DNA and sequenced the genetic code.

The researchers found that gene pools (and, by extrapolation, population numbers) of moas were stable throughout the 4000 years before

they disappeared. “Human-induced extinction is the only viable explanation,” Bunce says.

“Following human arrival, moa turn up as food scraps in a lot of archaeological sites.”

Over-hunting, the introduction of dogs and rats and use of fire all contributed to their extinction, he says.

It didn’t matter that at the time the population of New Zealand Polynesians was sparse. In research published in Nature Communications in November 2014, Bunce and his team show that around the time of the moa extinctions the area had the lowest population densities known for huntergatherers – about 1 person per 100 km2.

This finding lends support to the idea that humans in Australia could be a major factor in megafauna extinction – an idea previously cast in doubt as hunter-gatherer populations were thought too small to have such an impact.

Bunce now plans to try sequencing the entire moa genome. “It’s an exciting time for DNA,” he says. “We currently have great equipment and know-how to apply DNA technology to a variety of areas. This was not previously possible – watch this space!”

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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PROFILE

Molecular Detective

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HEN THE EARTH WARMED and the oceans turned toxic with hydrogen sulfide about 250 million years ago, up to 95% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial species were wiped out – the largest of five mass extinction events in Earth’s history. Much of what we know about these is thanks to research by John Curtin Distinguished Professor Kliti Grice – organic and isotope geochemist and founder of Curtin’s WA-Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre within the Institute for Geoscience Research and the John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research. Grice studies the molecular signatures of chemicals that have been made by micro-organisms, plants and animals, and deposited in lakes and oceans, thousands or even hundreds of millions of years ago.

Her work requires a deep knowledge of biochemical pathways, geology,

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chemistry, ecology, stable isotopes within organic molecules, and cutting edge analytical techniques in order to interpret clues left behind in rocks and determine which organisms lived in certain aquatic regions and when.

“I look at everything from about 2.3 billion years ago, through to the present day, including recovery after the extinction events,” she says.

“Most people know about the dinosaur extinction, which was unique because it was due to a meteorite impact,” she says. But the other mass extinctions were caused by changes in the atmosphere and oceans.

Grice is working on the Triassic-Jurassic extinction, which occurred about 200 million years ago when supercontinent Pangaea began to break up. “There was a lot of carbon dioxide and flood basalts from volcanic eruptions. We established that the same conditions existed

in the oceans then as they did in the largest extinction event 50 million years earlier,” she says. These events were biochemically driven, with environmental events leading to high carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide in bodies of water.

Grice’s research is also relevant to petroleum and mineral exploration, as well as to modern day climate and environmental changes. “We work with people across disciplines including geologists, engineers, mathematicians, biologists and geographers,” she says.

Grice is passionate about working with PhD students and early and mid-career scientists and helping them develop. “I like sharing my enthusiasm and ideas – seeing young scientists grow, helping them with their research and providing opportunities, including visits to different parts of the globe.”

– Michelle Wheeler n

OPTIMAL SOLUTIONS

NEWS

TWO MATHEMATICIANS FROM Curtin University have been helping oil and gas operator Woodside decide on the appropriate marine fleet to service its offshore facilities.

Woodside operates a number of offshore assets off the coast of northwest Australia. The company charters a vessel fleet to cater for the needs of the facilities: bringing food, water, fuel and chemicals from the supply base in Karratha, Western Australia, and helping its customers collect cargoes of oil and gas.

Woodside was upgrading its fleet, but with a variety of vessel types to choose from, some capable of servicing more than one type of need, it was important to make sure that the mix of vessels was optimal to meet requirements.

Ryan Loxton and Elham Mardaneh, who worked on the project, are members of the Curtin Industrial Modelling and Optimisation group – mathematicians who consult to companies like Woodside, providing optimal solutions to industrial problems.

“These are massive vessels doing heavy-duty work, and the costs are enormous,” says Loxton.

“Woodside was considering several different possible fleets, with vessels of various types. There were five or six different scenarios that the fleets needed to be able to deal with,” adds Loxton, who was awarded the 2014 Woodside Early Career Scientist of the Year.

“So we built an optimisation model which incorporated all of the different restrictions and constraints for any fleet.

Left to right: Woodside Senior Vice-President Shaun Gregory, Parliamentary Secretary Donna Faragher, Ryan Loxton, and Western Australia Premier Colin Barnett.

“We did simulations with their current fleet and on the potential new fleets and, based on the results, they made a decision of what to lease.”

Curtin’s model helped validate Woodside’s plans for the mix of vessels in the upgraded fleet. Woodside has also engaged Curtin to conduct fleet optimisation analysis to support future developments.

“People often think mathematics is just about coming up with abstract theories,” says Loxton. “But this is maths responding to real-world needs.” – Clare Pain n

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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RESOURCES

GROWTH FACTOR

A suite of high-precision instruments and global collaborations are creating an innovation hub at Curtin, where engineering and science researchers partner with industry

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T

HE JACK HILLS ARE part of an ancient landscape of scorched red earth in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. But it wasn’t until 2001, when a rock from the hills was brought 800 km south to Curtin University’s John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research (JDLC), that scientists discovered just how ancient this landscape really is. The Curtin scientists dated zircon crystals in the sample at 4.4 billion years, making it the oldest known Earth rock.

This groundbreaking research required a sophisticated measurement of trace elements in the crystal, and there are very few facilities in the world where this could have taken place. Zircon traps uranium in its crystal structure when it is formed. In principle, the radioactive decay of uranium into lead is like a ticking clock. If you can accurately measure how much lead has been created and how much uranium remains in a particular sample, you can work out when the crystal was formed. To do this, and to arrive at an age with an uncertainty of just 0.2%, Curtin researchers called upon the $4 million Sensitive High Resolution Ion Micro Probe (SHRIMP), the flagship technology of the JDLC. There are fewer than 20 SHRIMPs in the world, and Curtin is home to two of them.

“Zircon is like diamond – it’s forever,” explains JDLC Director, Professor Brent McInnes. Being a very hard and chemically inert material, zircon lasts for billions of years. The JDLC has world-renowned expertise in dating rocks by analysing the uranium-lead decay process in zircon.

The JDLC is also regularly put to more practical uses, such as aiding resource exploration in Western Australia. The SHRIMPs are the centrepieces of a suite of equipment worth $25 million, including

Curtin’s Sensitive High Resolution Ion Micro Probes (SHRIMPs), of which there are fewer than 20 worldwide, provides the basis for groundbreaking research.

scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopes, ion beam milling instruments, laser probes and mass spectrometers.

“We are an open access lab,” explains McInnes. “These instruments can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” The JDLC collaborates with research groups around the world and also assists the Geological Survey of Western Australia to make maps used to attract investment in mining and petroleum exploration. Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences researchers use the instruments to do similar work in China, controlling the Perth-based SHRIMPs remotely from Beijing.

The JDLC facilities have also been used to solve practical problems for industry partners. When exploration company Independence Group NL found tin in a gravel bed at the base of a WA river, they turned to the JDLC to help identify the origins of the ore.

Was it from a local source or had it been transported from elsewhere and deposited in the riverbed? Using SHRIMP, the JDLC team measured the quantities of trace uranium and lead elements in the tin ore cassiterite and calculated its age. When they performed similar measurements on zircon from local granite, they found its age was the same. This showed the tin was local,

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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RESOURCES

Recognising the gap, Curtin has set up a dedicated funding program, called Kickstart, to help translate lab research into commercial ventures.

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and helped the Independence Group pinpoint the precise locations to drill exploratory holes. “We have an incredible set of research tools that can be deployed to help industry reduce the risks and costs of exploration,” says McInnes.

COLLABORATING WITH INDUSTRY is a commonplace activity for John Curtin Distinguished Professor and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor – Faculty of Science and Engineering, Moses Tadé. Industry possesses considerable experts, he says, yet still tends to approach academics when looking at something more fundamental. Tadé’s group brings a range of skills to the table, including expertise in multi-scale modelling, computational flow dynamics, reaction engineering and optimisation modelling.

Collaboration is highly beneficial for both sides, he says.

Ongoing projects include the development of solid oxide fuel cells with a Melbourne-based fuel cell company, and a project in partnership with a petroleum industry multinational to remove mercury from oil and gas.

In recent years, sponsorship from

leading minerals and exploration companies Chevron Australia and Woodside Energy has supported the growth of the Curtin Corrosion Engineering Industry Centre, of which Tadé is Director. The Centre looks to develop practical solutions to the problem of corrosion in gas pipelines, which can lead to costly leaks and dangerous explosions.

In another project, led by chemical engineer Professor Vishnu Pareek, Curtin has teamed up with Woodside to develop a more efficient way to regasify liquefied natural gas. Currently, natural gas from Australia is liquified so it can be transported efficiently by ship to overseas markets, particularly China. But once it gets there, the regasification process can burn up to 2% of the product. A new process being developed at Curtin uses the energy in the ambient air to aid regasification – a more efficient solution that will both increase profits and reduce CO2 emissions. “It’s very exciting,” says Tadé. “A big thing for the environment.”

Curtin has become a busy hub of innovation, with a spate of spin-off companies being created to translate

the research. “We have a focused effort on commercialisation and research outcomes,” explains Rohan McDougall, Director of IP Commercialisation at Curtin.

Public funding of science and engineering research can often only take new technology to a certain level of development such as ‘proof-of-concept’.

Securing funds from investors to turn pre-commercial work into a real-world product is tough as investors are wary at this early high-risk stage. “The gap is traditionally known as the ‘valley of death’,” says McDougall. Recognising this gap, Curtin has set up a dedicated funding program, called Kickstart, to help translate lab research into commercial ventures.

As well as the extra funding, commercialisation is aided at Curtin by strong links with the venture capital community and industry, which advise on commercialisation routes and intellectual property. The university also

encourages an innovation environment by running contests in which staff and students describe technologies they are working on and that may have commercial applications.

This commercialisation focus has reaped dividends in terms of successful spin-off companies. In the medical space, Neuromonics sells a device for the treatment of the auditory condition tinnitus. In digital technology, iCetana has developed a video analytics technology for security applications.

Skrydata, a data analytics company, provides a service for extracting patterns from big data. Sensear has developed sophisticated hearing equipment technology for high-noise environments such as oil and gas facilities.

One of the biggest recent success stories has been Scanalyse, which in 2013 won the prestigious Australian Museum Rio Tinto Eureka Prize for Commercialisation of Innovation.

Scanalyse grew out of a collaboration

The John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research, led by Professor Brent McInnes (above left) – which has a team of scientists, including Associate Professor Noreen Evans (above), and a $25 million suite of equipment – assists resource exploration in Western Australia.

between Curtin and Alcoa, one of the world’s largest aluminium producers.

Alcoa called on Curtin’s experts to find a way to analyse the grinders used in their mills. Every time a grinder wore out, it was costing ~$100,000/hour in downtime. It was crucial to monitor the condition of these machines, but this required someone to climb inside and take measurements. Through their 2005 collaboration with Alcoa, spatial scientists at Curtin developed a laser scanning system capable of measuring 10 million points in just 30 minutes.

“At the same time, they developed a software tool that could be applied more generally,” explains McDougall.

“So the business was established to look at the application of that technology to mills and other mine site equipment.”

Scanalyse has since found customers in more than 20 countries and is making an impact worldwide. In 2013, it was bought by Finnish engineering giant Outotec. – Cathal O’Connell n

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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PROFILE

A Remarkable Career

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OMPELLED TO MOVE TO PERTH in 1972 because “there were no meaningful jobs in geoscience in the UK at the time”, John Curtin Distinguished Professor Simon Wilde carved out an illustrious career in the decades that followed his PhD at the University of Exeter.

“My work is largely focused on Precambrian geology, divided between Northeast Asia, the Middle East, India and Western Australia,” explains Wilde, from the Department of Applied Geology at Curtin University.

In 2001, Wilde received extensive media attention for his discovery of the oldest object ever found on Earth – a tiny 4.4 billion-year-old zircon crystal dug up in the Jack Hills region of Western Australia.

His zircon expertise and vast knowledge of early-Earth crustal growth and rock dating have taken him to many of the key areas in the world where Archean (more than 2.5 billion-year-old) rocks are exposed. Of these international investigations, perhaps the most impressive have been his contributions to understanding the geology of North China. Part of the first delegation of foreign researchers to visit the Aldan Shield in Siberia in 1988, along with several top Chinese geoscientists, Wilde has since fostered friendships and collaborations with colleagues in five top Chinese universities, as well as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.

“I have been to China more than 100 times and published more than 100 papers on Chinese geology, including major reviews of the North China Craton and the Central Asian Orogenic Belt, where I am a recognised expert,” he adds.

The Institute for Geoscience Research (TIGeR) at Curtin University is designated as a high-impact Tier 1 centre – the most distinguished research grouping within the university – providing a focus for substantial activity across a specific field of study. Wilde stepped down as Director in February 2015, having championed TIGeR research, provided advice and allocated funding for the eight years since the Institute was formed. He is confident that his research and the foundations he has built for the centre will continue to support innovative geoscience and exciting collaboration initiatives – in which he is certain to continue playing a major part. – Ben Skuse n

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PROFILE

Supercontinent Revolution

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ROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY at Curtin University Dr Zheng-Xiang Li considers himself a very lucky man. Born in a village in Shandong Province, East China, he fondly remembers the rock formations in the surrounding hills. But he was at school during the end of the Cultural Revolution – a time when academic pursuit was frowned upon and it was very hard to find good books to read. “Fortunately, I had some very good teachers who encouraged my curiosity,” recalls Li. He went on to secure a place at the prestigious Peking University to study geology and geophysics. And in 1984, when China’s then leader Deng Xiaoping sent a select number of students overseas, Li took the opportunity to study for a PhD in Australia. With an interest in plate tectonics and expertise in palaeomagnetism, he’s since become an authority on supercontinents.

It is widely accepted that the tectonic plates – which carry the continents – are moving, and that a supercontinent, Pangaea, existed 320–170 million years ago. Li’s research is aimed at understanding how ‘Earth’s engine’ drives the movement of the plates.

His work has been highly influential, showing that another supercontinent, Rodinia, formed about 600 million years before Pangaea. And evidence is mounting that there was yet another ancient supercontinent before that, known as Nuna, which assembled about 1600 million years ago.

Li suspects there is a cycle wherein supercontinents break up and their components then disperse around the globe, before once again coming together as a new supercontinent.

“The supercontinent cycle is probably around 600 million years. We are in the middle of a cycle: halfway between Pangaea and a fresh supercontinent,” he says.

“We are at the start of another geological revolution.

Plate tectonics revolutionised geology in the 1960s. I think we are now in the process of another revolution,” Li adds, undoubtedly excited by his work.

“The meaning of life can be described by three words beginning with ‘F’ – family, friends and fun,” he says. “And for me, work falls in the fun part.” – Clare Pain n

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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NEWS

DESERT FIREBALLS PIECES OF ROCK from space land on Earth every hour, says Professor Phil Bland of Curtin’s Department of Applied Geology, who has set up an ambitious project to match meteorites with their cosmic origins.

‘Shooting stars’ are not stars at all, explains Bland. They are meteors – streaks of light caused by small pieces of rock that burn up as they enter Earth’s atmosphere. Most are destroyed during their descent, but bigger rocks can make it to the ground.

“When one of these things lands on Earth, you’ve got a chunk of asteroid,” says Bland. “We’re amazingly lucky to get these samples, basically for free, from a whole bunch of different objects in the asteroid belt, even from Mars or the Moon.”

Bland and his team have set up a network of 32 cameras, 130 km apart, across much of remote Western Australia

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and South Australia, with the aim of triangulating meteorite trajectories as they approach Earth. From the photos, they can determine where in the Solar System the rock originated.

“It’s a lot trickier to work out where it will land on Earth,” says Bland. Factors like the size of the rock and whether or not it breaks up into fragments, as well as wind conditions, all affect where the pieces land. If it lands in the desert and the team gets to it quickly, it should be in pristine condition.

A sister project, Fireballs in the Sky, involves a smartphone app that the general public can use to record and report meteor tracks. If several people send in reports of the same meteor, Bland’s team can respond with details of its origin. “If you are out on a clear night, look up – I guarantee that in an hour you’ll see something amazing!” he says. – Clare Pain n

Inset left: A new smartphone app enables the general public to record and report sightings.

NEWS

OUT OF THIS WORLD THE SECRETS OF EARTH, the Moon and Mars are being uncovered by detailed studies of zircon crystals in ancient rocks. John Curtin Distinguished Professor Simon Wilde and Associate Professor Alexander Nemchin, with colleagues from Curtin’s Department of Applied Geology, undertake in situ isotopic analyses of zircons and other chemically complex materials. To do this they use Curtin’s two Sensitive High Resolution Ion Micro Probes (SHRIMPs) in the John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research.

“The oldest zircons on Earth, the Moon and Mars – which are all close to 4.4 billion years old – have been dated using the Curtin SHRIMPs,” says SHRIMP Manager Dr Allen Kennedy.

While Wilde primarily focuses on terrestrial zircons, Nemchin – who divides his time between Curtin and the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm – has analysed zircons from the Moon and Mars.

“Previous research in the seventies discovered abundant zircon in many lunar samples delivered by the Apollo missions,” Nemchin says. “So we used zircon samples from the Moon to gain a better understanding of how to interpret our terrestrial zircon data.”

The results were illuminating: “We found the currently oldest known zircon on the Moon with an age of 4.417 billion years – which provides the youngest limit to the formation of the lunar magma ocean.”

This vast ‘ocean’ of partially melted rock is thought to have swamped the Moon shortly after it formed.

In addition, Nemchin and his international collaborators, including NASA, identified a series of features in zircon grains that allow major lunar impact events to be dated. They have also developed novel methods of analysing phosphates from the Moon with a precision close to a few million years. “Together, this resulted in our questioning of the terminal lunar cataclysm hypothesis.”

Also known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, the lunar cataclysm concept was put forward in the 1970s. It suggests that asteroids barraged the Moon for a short time approximately 3.9 billion years ago, causing much of the cratering seen today on the lunar surface and having geological consequences for Earth.

Nemchin’s results instead suggest multiple cataclysmic spikes of impacts occurred

throughout the history of the Solar System, separated by relatively quiet periods.

The team also dated zircon found in an ancient Martian meteorite known as Black Beauty, which was discovered in the Sahara Desert in 2011 by Bedouin tribesmen. After they determined that the meteorite’s zircon crystals were 4.43 billion years old, the team took precise measurements that provided additional ideas about how the Martian atmosphere has changed through time.

They found that water on Mars was more abundant when the crystals formed, but something dramatically changed prior to 1.7 billion years ago, leaving the barren Martian desert that persists to this day.

– Ben Skuse n

Inset above: Zircon research by a team at the John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research found that dramatic changes on Mars 1.7 billion years ago resulted in its barren landscape of today.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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AGRICULTURE

SAVING GRAINS Communication, genetics expertise and on-the-ground knowledge help distinguish the research outcomes of Curtin’s Centre for Crop and Disease Management

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ACH YEAR, THE FUNGAL disease tan spot costs the Australian economy more than half a billion dollars. Tan spot, also known as yellow spot, is the most damaging disease to our wheat crops, annually causing an estimated $212 million in lost production and requiring about $463 million worth of control measures.

Fungal disease also causes huge damage to barley, Australia’s second biggest cereal crop export after wheat. It should come as no surprise, then, that the nation’s newest major agricultural research facility, Curtin University’s Centre for Crop and Disease Management (CCDM), is focusing heavily on the fungal pathogens of wheat and barley.

Launched in early 2014, with the announcement of an inaugural bilateral research agreement between Curtin and the Australian Government’s Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), the CCDM already has a team of about 40 scientists, with that number expected to double by 2016.

“We are examining the interactions of plants and fungal pathogens, and ways and means of predicting how the pathogen species are going to evolve

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so that we might be better prepared,” says CCDM Director, Professor Mark Gibberd.

An important point of difference for the centre is that, along with a strongly relevant R&D agenda, its researchers will be working directly with growers to advise on farm practices. Influencing the development and use of faster-acting and more effective treatments is part of the CCDM’s big-picture approach, says Gibberd. This encompasses both agronomy (in-field activities and practices) and agribusiness (the commercial side of operations).

“We want to know more about the issues that challenge farmers on a day-to-day basis,” explains Curtin Business School’s John Noonan, who is overseeing the extension of the CCDM’s R&D programs and their engagement with the public. The CCDM, he explains, is also focused on showing impact and return on investment in a broader context.

Two initiatives already making a significant impact on growers’ pockets include the tan spot and Septoria nodorum blotch programs. Tan spot, Australia’s most economically significant wheat disease, is caused by the fungus Pyrenophora tritici-repentis. Septoria nodorum blotch is

a similar fungal infection and Western Australia’s second most significant wheat disease.

Curtin University researchers were 2014 finalists in the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Sustainable Agriculture for their work on wheat disease. Their research included the development of a test that enables plant breeders to screen germinated seeds for resistance to these pathogens and subsequently breed disease-resistant varieties. It’s a two-week test that replaces three years of field-testing and reduces both yield loss and fungicide use.

When fungi infect plants, they secrete toxins to kill the leaves so they can feed on the dead tissue (toxins: ToxA for tan spot, and ToxA, Tox1 and Tox3 for Septoria nodorum blotch). The test for plant sensitivity involves injecting a purified form of these toxins – 30,000 doses of which the CCDM is supplying to Australian wheat breeders annually.

“We have seen the average tan spot disease resistance rating increase over the last year or so,” says Dr Caroline Moffat, tan spot program leader. This means the impact of the disease is being reduced. “Yet there are no wheat varieties in Australia that are totally resistant to tan spot.”

The development of fungicide resistance is one of the greatest threats to our food biosecurity, comparable to water shortage and climate change.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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Simon Ellwood

Worldwide, there are eight variants of the tan spot pathogen P. tritici-repentis.

Only half of them produce ToxA, suggesting there are other factors that enable the pathogen to infiltrate a plant’s defences and take hold. To investigate this, Moffat and her colleagues have deleted the ToxA gene in samples of P. tritici-repentis and are studying how it affects the plant-pathogen interaction.

During the winter wheat-cropping season, Moffat embarks on field trips across Australia to sample for P. tritici-repentis to get a ‘snapshot’ of the pathogen’s genetic diversity and how this is changing over time. Growers also send her team samples as part of a national ‘Stop the Spot’ campaign, which was launched in June 2014 and runs in collaboration with the GRDC. Of particular interest is whether the pathogen is becoming more virulent, which could mean the decimation of popular commercial wheat varieties.

WHEAT FUNGAL DISEASES can regularly cause a yield loss of about 15–20%. But for legumes – such as field pea, chickpea, lentil and faba bean – fungal infections can be even more devastating. The fungal disease ascochyta blight, for example, readily causes yield losses of about 75% in pulses. It makes growing pulses inherently risky, explains ascochyta blight program leader, Dr Judith Lichtenzveig.

In 1999, Western Australia’s chickpea industry was almost wiped out by the disease and has never fully recovered.

With yield reliability and confidence in pulses still low, few growers include them in their crop rotations – to the detriment of soil health.

Pulse crops provide significant benefit to subsequent cereals and oilseeds in the rotation, says Lichtenzveig, because they add nitrogen and reduce the impact of soil and stubble-borne diseases.

The benefits are seen immediately in the first year after the pulse is planted.

The chickpea situation highlights the need to develop new profitable varieties with traits desired by growers and that suit the Australian climate.

The CCDM also runs two programs concerned with barley, both headed by Dr Simon Ellwood. His research group is looking to develop crops with genetic

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resistance to two diseases that account for more than half of all yield losses in this important Australian crop – net blotch and powdery mildew.

Details of the barley genome were published in the journal Nature in 2012.

The grain contains about 32,000 genes, including ‘dominant R-genes’ that provide mildew resistance. The dominant R-genes allow barley plants to recognise corresponding avirulence (Avr) genes in mildew; if there’s a match between a plant R-gene and pathogen Avr genes, the plant mounts a defence response and the pathogen is unable to establish an infection. It’s relatively commonplace, however, for the mildew to alter its Avr gene so that it’s no longer recognised by the plant R-gene.

“This is highly likely when a particular barley variety with a given R-gene is grown over a wide area where mildew is prevalent, as there is a high selection pressure on mutations to the Avr gene,” explains Ellwood. This means the mildew may become a form that is unrecognised by the barley.

Many of the malting barley varieties grown in Western Australia, with the exception of Buloke, are susceptible to mildew. This contrasts with spring barley varieties being planted in Europe and the USA that have been bred to contain a gene called mlo, which provides resistance to all forms of powdery mildew.

Resistance to net blotch also occurs on two levels in barley. “As with mildew, on the first level, barley can recognise net blotch Avr genes early on through the interaction with dominant R-genes.

But again, because resistance is based on a single dominant gene interaction, it can be readily lost,” says Ellwood.

“If the net blotch goes unrecognised, it secretes toxins that allow the disease to take hold.”

On the second level, these toxins interact with certain gene products so that the plant cells become hypersensitised and die. By selecting for barley lines without the sections of genes that make these products, the crop will have a durable form of resistance.

Indeed, Ellwood says his team has found barley lines with these characteristics.

The next step is to determine how many genes control this durable resistance.

“Breeding for host resistance is cheaper

Kasia Clarke

AGRICULTURE

and more environmentally friendly than applying fungicides,” Ellwood adds.

NUMEROUS FUNGICIDES ARE used to prevent and control fungal pathogens, and they can be costly. Some have a common mode of action, and history tells us there’s a good chance they’ll become less effective the more they’re used.

“The development of fungicide resistance is one of the greatest threats to our food biosecurity ahead of water shortage and climate change,” says Gibberd. “It’s a very real and current problem for us.”

Fungicides are to grain growers what antibiotics are to doctors, explains Dr Fran Lopez-Ruiz, head of the CCDM’s fungicide resistance program. “The broad-spectrum fungicides are effective when used properly, but if the pathogens they are meant to control start to develop resistance, their value is lost.” Of the three main types of leaf-based fungicides used for cereal crops, demethylation inhibitors (DMIs) are the oldest, cheapest and most commonly used.

Lopez-Ruiz says that to minimise the chance of fungi becoming resistant, sprays should not be used year-in, year-out without a break. The message hasn’t completely penetrated the farming community and DMI-resistance is spreading in Australia. A major aim within Lopez-Ruiz’s program is to produce a geographical map of fungicide resistance.

“Not every disease has developed resistance to the available fungicides yet, which is a good thing,” says Lopez-Ruiz.

DMIs target an enzyme called CYP51, which makes a cholesterol-like compound called ergosterol that is essential for fungal cell survival. Resistance develops when the pathogens accumulate several

The CCDM is researching solutions to plant diseases such as powdery mildew in barley (main), and Septoria nodorum blotch (above left) in wheat, with Dr Caroline Moffat (right) leading a program to tackle the wheat tan spot fungus.

This is a massive achievement, and we have already shown that the use of more expensive chemicals can be justified on the basis of an increase in crop yield.

A GLOBAL PROBLEM

Curtin University

MORE THAN HALF of Australia’s land area is used for agriculture – 8% of this is used for cropping, and much of the rest for activities such as forestry and livestock farming.

Although Australia’s agricultural land area has decreased by 15% during the past decade, from about 470 million to 397 million ha, it’s more than enough to meet current local demand and contribute to international markets.

Nevertheless, the world’s population continues to grow at a rapid rate, increasing demands for staple food crops and exacerbating food shortages. Australia is committed to contributing to global need and ensuring the sustained viability of agriculture. To this end, Professor Richard Oliver, Chief Scientist of Curtin’s Centre for Crop and Disease Management (CCDM), has established formal relationships with overseas institutions sharing common goals (see page 26). This helps CCDM researchers access a wider range of relevant biological resources and keep open international funding opportunities, particularly in Europe.

“The major grant bodies have a very good policy around cereal research where the results are freely available,” says Oliver. “There’s also the possibility to conduct large experiments requiring lots of space – either within glasshouses or in-field – which would be restricted or impossible in Australia.” It’s a win-win situation. mutations in their DNA that change the structure of CYP51 so it’s not affected by DMIs. In the barley disease powdery mildew in WA, a completely new set of mutations has evolved, resulting in the emergence of fungicide-resistant populations.

The first of these mutations has just been identified in powdery mildew in Australia’s eastern states, making it essential that growers change their management tactics to prevent the development of full-blown resistance.

Critical messages such as these are significant components of John Noonan’s communications programs.

RESISTANCE TO ANOTHER GROUP of fungicides, Qols, began to appear within two years of their availability here. They are, however, still widely used in a mixed treatment, which hinders the development of resistance. Lopez-Ruiz says it’s important we don’t end up in a situation where there’s no solution: “It’s not easy to develop new compounds every time we need them, and it’s expensive – more than $200 million to get it to the growers”.

The high cost of testing and registering products can deter companies from offering their products to Australian growers – particularly if, as in the case of legumes, the market is small.

To help convince the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority that it should support the import and use of chemicals that are already being safely used overseas, the CCDM team runs a fungicide-testing project for companies to trial their products at sites where disease pressures differ – for example, because of climate. This scheme helps provide infrastructure and data to fast-track chemical registrations.

“This is a massive achievement, and we have already shown that the use of more expensive chemicals can be justified on the basis of an increase in crop yield,” says Lopez-Ruiz. – Branwen Morgan n

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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PROFILE

Foundations for Success

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HE HUGELY SUCCESSFUL career of John Curtin Distinguished Professor Richard Oliver didn’t get off to a perfect start. First, he was not accepted into medical school and, crestfallen, he decided to study biochemistry. As a student, he fainted taking blood from a rabbit, so he turned his attention to plants. It was a fortunate decision and the serendipitous launch to a career that’s since brought huge benefits to Australian farmers.

UK-born Oliver began his studies at Bristol University, where he received a “rigorous education in biochemistry” – much of which he has been using ever since. In 1982, realising the potential of the then-infant science of molecular biology, he went to work at Denmark’s Carlsberg Laboratory to train in new genetics techniques.

After accepting a lectureship in molecular biology at the University of East Anglia in the UK, he decided to work on the genes that make plants resistant to disease: an area of great importance but about which little was known at the time.

Working on a fungus that attacks tomatoes, Oliver looked at the interactions from both sides – building up a picture of the plant genes that conveyed resistance and the genes of the fungus that made it virulent. During the next 15 years, he pioneered techniques to analyse plant-fungal interactions. A job as a professor back at the Carlsberg

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Edge Of Tomorrow

Laboratory gave him the resources to start really making an impact, and soon he was in Australia working on fungal diseases of wheat and barley – first at Murdoch University, then at Curtin University.

Oliver is now the Chief Scientist at Curtin’s new Centre for Crop and Disease Management, made possible by $100 million in funding over the next five years from the university and the government Grains Research Development Corporation (GRDC). “It’s the biggest grant in the history of Curtin University,” Oliver says.

“Up to now, we’ve had two major success stories,” he says of work that preceded the grant. One involved selecting for wheat varieties that are not affected by proteins produced by fungal pathogens. The other involved alerting the farming community about crop management techniques to improve the control of major fungal diseases.

As a GRDC adviser, Oliver had the task of convincing farmers that the organisation was spending their money wisely. It wasn’t easy in the early days, but it’s not as difficult now that his two success stories are saving Australian farming up to $200 million every year.

Oliver believes an excellent university education underlies his success. “What’s important in your education is not the specific information you learn, but the ability to carry on learning.” Perhaps his career had the perfect start after all. – Clare Pain n

NEWS

TRACING CHANGE CURTIN UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS are creating snapshots of past Australian environments using the minute traces left behind by plants, animals and microorganisms. Dr Svenja Tulipani and Professor Kliti Grice from the WA-Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre looked for clues in sediments at Coorong National Park, South Australia, to find out how this system of coastal lagoons has changed since European settlement.

The Coorong Wetland is an ecologically significant area, but human water management practices and severe drought have led to increased salinity and less biodiversity, Tulipani explains. By examining microscopic molecular fossils, known as biomarkers, and their stable carbon and hydrogen isotopes, the researchers have identified the types of organisms that previously lived in the area, uncovering evidence for changes in water level and salinity due to changes in carbon and hydrogeological cycles.

“We found significant changes that started in the 1950s, at the same time that water management was

intensified,” Tulipani says. “It affects the whole food web, including the birdlife and ecology,” Grice adds.

The project used Curtin’s world-class instruments for gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, as well as a new instrument that is capable of even better analysis.

“It allows for a new technique that reduces sample preparation time as the organic compounds can be analysed in more complex mixtures, such as whole oils or extracts of sediments and modern organisms,” Tulipani explains. “We can also identify more compounds this way.”

Tulipani has been able to use samples taken from the remote Kimberley region to examine an extinction event around 380 million years ago. Grice says the techniques are particularly relevant to the evolution of primitive vascular plants during this time period.

“In some locations of the Pilbara region, you can look at very early life from more than 2.5 billion years ago. You can go back practically to the beginning of life.”

– Michelle Wheeler n

We found significant changes that started in the 1950s, which was the same time that the water management was intensified.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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NEWS

FIRE AND ICE A PROJECT TO CHART the history of fires in the Southern Hemisphere during the past 100,000 years is using a surprising natural resource: ice. The record of bushfires in Australia, South Africa and South America is revealed in tiny particles of soot trapped in deep ice across Antarctica.

Led by Dr Ross Edwards, an Associate Professor in physics and astronomy at the John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research, the research is being carried out by a Curtin University team that’s collaborating with an international group of scientists to analyse a 750 m-long core drilled from pristine Antarctic ice.

The concentrations of soot in the ice are minute (ranging from 20 parts per trillion to one part per billion) and extremely sensitive equipment is needed to detect them. “It took many years to come up with a method to analyse and detect these tiny particles,” says Edwards.

“Most of the fires on Earth are in the Southern Hemisphere, and the only way to understand the long-term impact of soot on the atmosphere is through Antarctic ice,” he explains. “Antarctic ice is like the Earth’s hard drive. Up to now we’ve only been able to open a few of its folders, but now we’re starting to see that there is much more information than we thought.”

Antarctica is ideal for studying Southern Hemisphere fires. “It’s the remotest region on Earth, so any particles that get there are really well mixed, giving the background levels. Of course, there are no natural fires there. It’s a remote viewing point,” Edwards says.

Tracking bushfire history could shed light on past ecosystems and increase our understanding of Earth’s climate. Edwards hopes to go all the way back to a period before the El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon (which drives the climate in the Southern Hemisphere) became established. He also hopes to quantify the human influence on fires, by looking at ice that formed before people arrived in South America and Australia.

“The problem now is that we are overwhelmed with data and it takes a long time to work through it,” Edwards says.

Ways to work out from which continent the soot has come are still being developed, but Edwards has already noticed that fires were most common when Australia had been through a wet period. High rainfall in the interior of Australia leads to more vegetation growth, which then fuels fires when the dry weather returns.

Next, Edwards wants to analyse a core that covers a million years of data – and he’s already working with national and international collaborators to develop that project. – Clare Pain n Ross Edwards standing in the location that the glacier terminated at when he first visited it in 2002.

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PROFILE

Building a Dream

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ROFESSOR ZONGPING SHAO dreams of an inexpensive electric car that can drive 500 km on a single charge with a battery that reaches 80% capacity within half an hour.

The clean energy researcher works with scientists around the world to make lithium-ion batteries more efficient, spearheading the development of electric cars globally.

Lithium-ion batteries are typically used in smartphones and portable electronics but Shao is working on more powerful batteries for use in transportation and large-scale energy storage.

While electric cars with lithium-ion batteries are already available, Shao says they are expensive and can be dangerous.

“We’re trying to reduce the price of the lithium battery and also to increase the safety and performance. It’s very complicated, as we need to both develop the material and design the battery.”

Shao hopes to see electric cars make up 5% of the vehicles on the road within the next five years. “It’s a challenge we have to face. We are going to run short of petrol in the near future, and electric cars may be the better solution.”

Shao’s other main field of research is the development of solid oxide fuel cells that can convert hydrocarbons into electricity and be used to generate clean power. He is working on a high-temperature, low-emission fuel cell that operates at 500–800°C. This would be able to directly convert hydrocarbons such as natural gas or coal into electricity. It would be “much more efficient than a conventional power plant,” he says.

In 2010, at the age of 37, Shao won the National Natural Science Foundation of China’s Distinguished Young Scientist Award – the highest honour for Chinese researchers under the age of 45. He worked in Europe, the US and China before finding a home at Curtin University.

Shao says he enjoys the freedom to research and the support the university provides. “I like to work on something that is still unknown – that’s very attractive to me. And we make a lot of friends all over the world – there’s a lot of cooperation.”

– Michelle Wheeler n

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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ENGINEERING

FUELLING THE FUTURE

The complex engineering that drives renewable energy innovation, global satellite navigation, and the emerging science of industrial ecology is among Curtin University’s acknowledged strengths

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DVANCED ENGINEERING IS CRUCIAL to meeting the challenges of climate change and sustainability.

Curtin is addressing these issues in several key research centres.

Bioenergy, fuel cells and large energy storage systems are a focus for the university’s Fuels and Energy Technology Institute (FETI), launched in February 2012. The institute brings together a network of more than 50 researchers across Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Denmark and the USA, and has an array of advanced engineering facilities and analytic instruments. It also hosts the Australia-China Joint Research Centre for Energy, established in 2013 to address energy security and emissions reduction targets for both countries.

Curtin’s Sustainable Engineering Group (SEG) has been a global pioneer in industrial ecology, an emerging science which tracks the flow of resources and energy in industrial areas, measures their impact on the environment and works out ways to create a “circular economy” to reduce carbon emissions and toxic waste.

And in renewable energy research, Curtin is developing new materials for high temperature fuel cell membranes, and is working with an award-winning bioenergy technology that will use agricultural crop waste to produce biofuels and generate electricity.

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SOLAR’S BIG SHOT

Curtin’s hydrogen storage scientists are involved in one of the world’s biggest research programs to drive down the cost of solar power and make it competitive with other forms of electricity generation such as coal and gas. They are contributing to the United States SunShot Initiative – a US$2 billion R&D effort jointly funded by the US Department of Energy and private industry partners to fast track technologies that will cut the cost of solar power, including manufacturing for solar infrastructure and components.

SunShot was launched in 2011 as a key component of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which aims to double the amount of renewable energy available through the grid and reduce the cost of large-scale solar electricity by 75%.

Professor Craig Buckley, Dean of Research and Professor of Physics at Curtin’s Faculty of Science and Engineering, is the lead investigator

FROM BIOMASS TO FUEL

on an Australian Research Council Linkage Project on energy storage for Concentrating Solar Power (CSP), and a chief investigator with the SunShot CSP program. His team at Curtin’s Hydrogen Storage Research Group is using metal hydrides to develop a low cost hydrogen storage technology for CSP thermal energy plants such as solar power towers.

CSP systems store energy in a material called molten salts – a mixture of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate, which are common ingredients in plant fertilisers.

These salts are heated to 565°C, pumped into an insulated storage tank and used to produce steam to power a turbine to generate electricity. But it’s an expensive process. The 195 m tall Crescent Dunes solar power tower in Nevada – one of the world’s largest and most advanced solar thermal plants – uses 32,000 tonnes of molten salt to extend operating hours by storing thermal energy for 10 hours after sunset.

Metal hydrides – compounds formed by bonding hydrogen with a material such as calcium, magnesium or sodium – could replace molten salts and greatly reduce the costs of building and operating solar thermal power plants.

Certain hydrides operate at higher temperatures and require smaller storage tanks than molten salts. They can also be reused for up to 25 years.

At the Nevada plant, molten salt storage costs an estimated $150 million, – around 10–15% of operation costs, says Buckley. “With metal hydrides replacing molten salts, we think we can reduce that to around $50–$60 million, resulting in significantly lower operation costs for solar thermal plants,” he says. “We already have a patent on one process, so we’re in the final stages of testing the properties of the process for future scale-up. We are confident that metal hydrides will replace molten salts as the next generation thermal storage system for CSP.”

John Curtin Distinguished Professor Chun-Zhu Li is lead researcher on a FETI project that was awarded a grant of $5.2 million by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency in 2015 to build a pilot plant to test and commercialise a new biofuel technology. The plant will produce energy from agricultural waste such as wheat straw and mallee eucalypts from wheatbelt farm forestry plantations in Western Australia.

“These bioenergy technologies will have great social, economic and environmental benefits,” says Li. “It will contribute to the electricity supply mix and also realise the commercial value of mallee plantations for wheatbelt farmers. It will make those plantations an economically viable way of combating the huge environmental problem of dryland salinity in WA.” Li estimates that WA’s farms produce several million tonnes of wheat straw per year, which is discarded as agricultural waste. Biomass gasification is a thermochemical process converting biomass feedstock into synthesis gas (syngas) to generate electricity using gas engines or other devices.

One of the innovations of the biomass gasification technology developed at FETI is the destruction of tar by char or char-supported catalysts produced from the biomass itself. Other biomass gasification systems need water-scrubbing to remove tar, which also generates a liquid waste stream requiring expensive treatment, but the technology developed

by Li’s team removes the tar without the generation of any wastes requiring disposal. This reduces construction and operation costs and makes it an ideal system for small-scale power generation plants in rural and remote areas.

Li’s team is also developing a novel technology to convert the same type of biomass into liquid fuels and biochar.

The combined benefits of these bioenergy/biofuel technologies could double the current economic GDP of WA’s agricultural regions, Li adds.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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ENGINEERING

KEEPING RENEWABLES ON GRID

Professor Syed Islam is a John Curtin Distinguished Professor with Curtin’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computing. It’s the highest honour awarded by the university to its academic staff and recognises outstanding contributions to research and the wider community. Islam has published widely on grid integration of renewable energy sources and grid connection challenges. In 2011, he was awarded the John Madsen Medal by Engineers Australia for his research to improve the prospect of wind energy generation developing grid code enabled power conditioning techniques.

Islam explains that all power generators connected to an electricity network must comply with strict grid codes for the network to operate safely and efficiently. “The Australian Grid Code specifically states that wind turbines must be capable of uninterrupted operation, and if electrical faults are not immediately overridden, the turbines will be disconnected from the grid,” he says.

“Wind energy is a very cost effective renewable technology. But disturbances and interruptions to power generation mean that often wind farms fall below grid code requirements, even when the best wind energy conversion technology is being used.”

Islam has led research to develop a system that allows a faster response by wind farm voltage control technologies to electrical faults and voltage surges.

It has helped wind turbine manufacturers meet grid regulations, and will also help Australia meet its target to source 20% of electricity from renewable energy by 2020.

Islam says micro-grid technology will also provide next-generation manufacturing opportunities for businesses in Australia. “There will be new jobs in battery technology, in building and operating micro-grids and in engineering generally,” he says.

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By replacing the need for platinum catalysts, we can make fuel cells much cheaper and more efficient, and reduce dependence on environmentally damaging fossil fuels.

CUTTING FUEL CELL COSTS Professor San Ping Jiang from FETI and his co-researcher Professor Roland De Marco at University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland recently received an Australian Research Council grant of $375,000 to develop a new proton exchange membrane that can operate in high-temperature fuel cells. It’s a materials engineering breakthrough that will cut the production costs of fuel cells, and allow more sustainable and less polluting fuels such as ethanol to be used in fuel cells.

Jiang, who is based at Curtin’s School of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, has developed a silica membrane that can potentially operate at temperatures of up to 500°C. Fuel cells directly convert chemical energy of fuels such as hydrogen, methanol and ethanol into electricity and provide a lightweight alternative to batteries, but they are currently limited in their application because conventional polymer-based proton exchange membranes perform

most efficiently at temperatures below 80°C. Jiang has developed a membrane that can operate at 500°C using heteropoly acid functionalised mesoporous silica – a composite that combines high proton conductivity and high structural stability to conduct protons in fuel cells.

His innovation also minimises the use of precious metal catalysts such as platinum in fuel cells, reducing the cost.

“The cost of platinum is a major barrier to the wider application of fuel cell technologies,” Jiang says. “We think we can reduce the cost significantly, possibly by up to 90%, by replacing the need for platinum catalysts. It will make fuel cells much cheaper and more efficient, and reduce dependence on environmentally damaging fossil fuels.”

He says the high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells can be used in devices such as smartphones and computers, and in cars, mining equipment and communications in remote areas.

DOING MORE WITH LESS

The SEG at Curtin University has been involved in energy efficiency and industrial analysis for just over 15 years. It’s been a global leader in an emerging area of sustainability assessment known as industrial ecology, which looks at industrial areas as ‘ecosystems’ that can develop productive exchanges of resources.

Associate Professor Michele Rosano is SEG’s Director and a resource economist who has written extensively on sustainability metrics, charting the life cycles of industrial components, carbon emission reduction and industrial waste management. They’re part of a process known as industrial symbiosis – the development of a system for neighbouring industries to share resources, energies and by-products. “It’s all about designing better industrial systems, and doing more with less,” Rosano says.

Curtin and SEG have been involved in research supported by the Australian’s Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Program to develop sustainable technologies and systems for the mineral processing industry at the Kwinana Industrial Area, an 8 km coastal industrial strip about 40 km south of Perth. The biggest concentration of heavy industries in Western Australia, Kwinana includes oil, alumina and nickel refineries, cement manufacturing, chemical and fertiliser plants, water treatment utilities and a power station that uses coal, oil and natural gas.

Rosano says two decades of research undertaken by Curtin at Kwinana is now recognised as one of the world’s largest and most successful industrial ecology projects. It has created 49 industrial symbiosis projects, ranging from shared use of energy and water to recovery and reuse of previously discarded by-products.

“These are huge and complex projects which have produced substantial environmental and economic benefits,” she says.

“Kwinana is now seen as a global benchmark for the way in which industries can work together to reduce their footprint.”

An example of industrial synergies is waste hydrochloric acid from minerals processing being reprocessed by a neighbouring chemical plant for reuse in rutile quartz processing. The industrial ecology researchers looked at ways to reuse a stockpile of more than 1.3 million tonnes of gypsum, which is a waste product from the manufacture of phosphate fertiliser and livestock feeds. The gypsum waste is used by Alcoa’s alumina refinery at Kwinana to improve soil stability and plant growth in its residue areas.

The BP oil refinery at Kwinana also provides hydrogen to fuel Perth’s hydrogen fuel-cell buses. The hydrogen is produced by BP as a by-product from its oil refinery and is piped to an industrial gas facility that separates, cleans and pressurises it. The hydrogen is then trucked to the bus depot’s refuelling station in Perth.

Rosano says 21st century industries “are serious about sustainability” because of looming future shortages of many raw materials, and also because research has demonstrated there are social, economic and environmental benefits to reducing greenhouse emissions.

“There is a critical need for industrial ecology, and that’s why we choose to focus on it,” she says. “It’s critical research that will be needed to save and protect many areas of the global economy in future decades.” – Rosslyn Beeby n

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE Research by Professor Peter Teunissen and Dr Dennis Odijk at Curtin’s Department of Spatial Sciences was the first study in Australia to integrate next generation satellite navigation systems with the commonly used and well-established Global Positioning System (GPS) launched by the United States in the 1990s.

Odijk says a number of new systems are being developed in China, Russia, Europe, Japan, and India, and it’s essential they can interact successfully. These new Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) will improve the accuracy and availability of location data, which will in turn improve land surveying for locating mining operations and renewable energy plants.

“The new systems have an extended operational range, higher power and better modulation. They are more robust and better able to deal with challenging situations like providing real-time data to respond to bushfires and other emergencies,” says Odijk.

“When these GNSS systems begin operating over the next couple of years, they will use a more diverse system of satellites than the traditional GPS system. The challenge will be to ensure all these systems can link together.”

Integrating these systems will increase the availability of data, “particularly when the signals from one system might be blocked in places like open-pit mines or urban canyons – narrow city streets with high buildings on both sides.”

Teunissen and Odijk’s research on integrating the GNSS involves dealing with the complex challenges of comparing estimated positions from various satellites, as well as inter-system biases, and developing algorithms. The project is funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, and includes China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, which is now operating across the Asia-Pacific region.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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NEWS

BIG DATA SOLVES GLOBAL ISSUES

CURTIN UNIVERSITY’S SPATIAL SCIENCES TEAMS are using advanced processing power and community engagement to solve social and environmental problems. Advanced facilities and expertise at Perth’s Pawsey Supercomputing Centre support the Square Kilometre Array – a multi-array radio telescope due to launch in 2024 – and undertake high-end science using increasingly large and complex datasets.

Individual computers at the $80 million facility have processing power in excess of a petaflop (one quadrillion floating point operations per second) – that’s 100,000 times the flops handled by your average Mac or PC. The November 2014 Top 500 Supercomputing list has ranked the largest computer ‘Magnus’ as number 41 in the world.

Curtin University is a key participant in iVEC, the joint venture which runs the Pawsey Centre, and is also a partner in the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information. As such, it is at the forefront of efforts to use big data to solve global issues. For instance, says the head of Curtin’s Department of Spatial Sciences Professor Bert Veenendaal, Curtin researchers are using Pawsey supercomputers to manage growing volumes of data on water resources, land use, climate change and infrastructure.

“There is a rich repository of information and knowledge among the vast amounts of data captured by satellites, ground and mobile sensors, as well as the everyday usage information related to people carrying mobile devices,” he says.

“Increasing amounts of data are under-utilised because of a lack of know-how and resources to integrate and extract useful knowledge,” he explains. “Big data infrastructures coupled with increasing research in modelling and knowledge extraction will achieve this.”

Curtin’s projects include mapping sea-level rise and subsidence along the WA coastline near Perth, generating high-resolution maps of the Earth’s gravity field and modelling climate over diverse regions.

Some research projects have the potential to expand and make use of big data in community development. In one such project, the team worked with a community in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana, to collect information and map data using geographic information science.

This helped the local community to determine the extent of vegetation cover in their local area, water access points for animals and how far the animals travelled from the water points to food sources. Using this data, one local woman was able to create a goat breeding business plan to develop a herd of stronger animals.

Curtin’s researchers are planning future big data projects, such as applying global climate change models to regional areas across multiple time scales, and bringing together signals from multiple Global Navigation Satellite Systems, such as the USA’s GPS, China’s BeiDou and the EU’s Galileo.

A wide variety of researchers across Curtin are actively pursuing answers to some of the most complex questions in science, engineering, business and the humanities. As the university’s research capacity and capability grows in this area, so will our ability to maximise the Pawsey supercomputing infrastructure. – Laura Boness n

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Data bank at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre Photo: James Campbell

PROFILE

Smarter Separation

P

ROFESSOR SHAOMIN LIU from Curtin’s Department of Chemical Engineering is on a mission to make clean energy production affordable. Born in Shandong Province, China, Liu’s uncle told him that chemical engineers were in great demand. An aptitude for chemistry and maths at school made the subject his obvious choice. He now holds a prestigious Australian Research Council ‘future fellowship’ – designed to attract and retain the most talented mid-career researchers working in areas of national importance.

While studying for his doctorate in Singapore, Liu focused on ceramic membranes – novel inorganic materials that can provide a ‘clever’ barrier between two liquids or gases. Ceramic membranes have great potential in separating gas mixtures, which is frequently needed in the chemical industry.

Air, for instance, is a mixture of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% other gases. For more than a century, we have been extracting oxygen and nitrogen from air by cooling it to -185°C (cryogenic separation). “You need a lot of energy to cool air to such a low temperature – it’s very expensive,” says Liu. But by blowing air through a ceramic membrane that is permeable for oxygen, but not nitrogen, the gases can be separated with minimal energy expenditure. Existing ceramic membranes have low operational stability, however, says Liu. To address this, he has developed a fluorite-based ceramic membrane made of tiny hollow fibres of special material, which could assist in clean energy production.

Carbon dioxide (CO2), produced by burning coal or gas in air, will increasingly be liquefied and then sequestered underground, but more than 50% of the cost involved, says Liu, is separating CO2 from nitrogen in the air. Liu is pioneering the use of ceramics to make ‘artificial air’ for combustion – instead of oxygen mixed with nitrogen, it would be oxygen mixed with 70% CO2 recycled from waste gases. This means that the exhaust gases will be pure CO2, which can then readily be liquefied. – Clare Pain n

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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CHEMISTRY

SMALL SCALE, BIG CONSEQUENCES The multidisciplinary team at Curtin University’s Nanochemistry Research Institute examines the world on an atomic and subatomic level to solve major problems

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T

HE NANOSCALE IS SO TINY it’s almost beyond comprehension.

Too small for detection by the human eye, and not even discernible by most laboratory microscopes, it refers to measurements in the range of 1–100 billionths of a metre. The nanoscale is the level at which atoms and molecules come together to form structured materials.

Curtin University’s Nanochemistry Research Institute (NRI) conducts fundamental and applied research to understand, model and tailor materials at the nanoscale. It brings together scientists – with expertise in chemistry, engineering, computer simulations, materials and polymers – and external collaborators to generate practical applications in health, energy, environmental management, industry and exploration. These include new tests for cancer, and safer approaches to oil and gas transportation. Research ranges from government-funded exploratory science to confidential industry projects.

THE NRI HOSTS RESEARCH groups with specialist expertise in the chemical formation of minerals and other materials.

“To understand minerals, it’s often important to know what is going on at the level of atoms,” explains Julian Gale, John Curtin Distinguished Professor in Computational Chemistry and former Acting Director of the NRI. “To do this, we use virtual observation – watching how atoms interact at the nanoscale – and modelling, where we simulate the behaviour of atoms on a computer.”

The mineral calcium carbonate is produced through biomineralisation by some marine invertebrates. “If we understand the chemistry that leads to the formation of carbonates in the environment, then we can look at how factors such as ocean temperature and pH can lead to the loss of minerals that are a vital component of coral reefs,” says Gale.

This approach could be used to build an understanding of how minerals are produced biologically, potentially leading

to medical and technological benefits, including applications in bone growth and healing, or even kidney stone prevention and treatment.

Gale anticipates that a better understanding of mineral geochemistry may also shed light on how and where metals are distributed. “If you understand the chemistry of gold in solution and how deposits form, you might have a better idea where to look for the next gold mine,” he explains.

There are also environmental implications. “Formation of carbonate minerals, especially magnesium carbonate and its hydrates, has been proposed as a means of trapping atmospheric carbon in a stable solid state through a process known as geosequestration. We work with colleagues in the USA to understand how such carbonates form,” says Gale.

Minerals science is also relevant in industrial settings. Calcium carbonate scaling reduces flow rates in pipes and other structures in contact with water.

“As an example, the membranes used for reverse osmosis in water desalination – a water purification technology that uses a semipermeable membrane to remove salt and other minerals from saline water – can trigger the formation of calcium carbonate,” explains Gale. “This results in partial blockage of water flow through the membrane, and reduced efficiency of the desalination process.”

A long-term aim of research in this area is to design water membranes that prevent these blockages. There are also potential applications in the oil industry, where barium sulphate (barite) build-up reduces the flow in pipes, and traps dangerous radioactive elements such as radium.

Another problem for exploration companies is the formation of hydrates of methane and other low molecular weight hydrocarbon molecules. These can block pipelines and processing equipment during oil and gas transportation and operations, which results in serious safety and flow assurance issues. Materials chemist Associate Professor Xia Lou leads

To understand minerals, it’s often important to know what is going on at the level of the atom. a large research group in the Department of Chemical Engineering that is developing low-dose gas hydrates inhibitors to prevent hydrate formation.

“We also develop nanomaterials for the removal of organic contaminants in water, and nanosensors to detect or extract heavy metals,” she says.

THE CAPACITY TO CONTROL how molecules come together and then disassociate offers tantalising opportunities for product development, particularly in food science, drug delivery and cosmetics. In the Department of Chemistry, Professor Mark Ogden conducts nanoscale research looking at hydrogels, or networks of polymeric materials suspended in water.

“We study the 3D structure of hydrogels using the Institute’s scanning probe microscope,” says Ogden. “The technique involves running a sharp tip over the surface of the material.

It provides an image of the topography of the surface, but we can also measure how hard, soft or sticky the surface is.”

Ogden is developing methods for watching hydrogels grow and fall apart through heating and cooling. “We have the capability to do that sort of imaging now, and this in situ approach is quite rare around the world,” he says.

Ogden also conducts chemical research with a group of metals known as lanthanoids, which are rare-earth elements. His recent work, in collaboration with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), discovered unique elongated nanoscale structures.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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CHEMISTRY

ATOMIC MODELLING MATTERS IN RESEARCH PROFESSOR JULIAN GALE leads a world-class research group in computational materials chemistry at the Nanochemistry Research Institute (NRI). “We work at the atomic level, looking at fundamental processes by which materials form,” he says.

“We can simulate up to a million atoms or more, and then test how the properties and behaviour of the atoms change in response to different experimental conditions.”

Such research is made possible through accessing a petascale computer at WA’s Pawsey Centre – built primarily to support Square Kilometre Array pathfinder research.

The capacity to model the nanoscale behaviour of atoms is a powerful tool in “We’ve identified lanthanoid clusters that can emit UV light and have magnetic properties,” explains Ogden. “Some of these can form single molecule magnets.

A key outcome will be to link cluster size and shape to these functional properties.”

This may facilitate guided production of magnetic and light-emitting materials for use in sensing and imaging technologies.

THE NRI IS WORKING ACROSS several areas of chemistry and engineering to develop nanoscale tools for detecting and treating health conditions. Professor Damien Arrigan applies a nanoscale electrochemical approach to detecting biological molecules, also known as biosensing. He and his Department of Chemistry colleagues work at the precise junction between layered oil and water.

“We make oil/water interfaces using membranes with nanopores, some as small as 15 nanometres,” he says. “This scale delivers the degree of sensitivity we’re after.” The scientists measure the passage of electrical currents across the tiny interfaces and detect protein, which absorbs at the boundary between the two

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nanochemistry research, and can give direction to experimental work. The calcium carbonate mineral vaterite is a case in point.

“Our theoretical work on calcium carbonate led to the proposal that the mineral vaterite was actually composed of at least three different forms,” Gale explains. “An international team found experimental evidence which supported this idea.”

NRI Director Professor Andrew Lowe regards this capacity as an asset. “Access to this kind of atomic modelling means that our scientists can work within a hypothetical framework to test whether a new idea is likely to work or not before they commit time and money to it,” he explains. liquids. “As long as we know a protein’s isoelectric point – that is, the pH at which it carries no electrical charge – we can measure its concentration,” he explains.

The technique enables the scientists to detect proteins at nanomolar (10−6 mol/m3) concentrations, but they hope to shift the sensitivity to the picomolar (10−9 mol/m3) range – a level of detection a thousand times more sensitive and not possible with many existing protein assessments.

Further refinement may also incorporate markers to select for proteins of interest.

“What we’d like to do one day is measure specific proteins in biological fluids like saliva, tears or serum,” says Arrigan.

The team’s long-term vision is to develop highly sensitive point-of-need measurements to guide treatments – for example, testing kits for paramedics to detect markers released after a heart attack so that appropriate treatment can be immediately applied.

Also in the Department of Chemistry, Dr Max Massi is developing biosensing tools to look at the health of living tissues.

His approach relies on tracking the location and luminescence of constructed

If you understand the chemistry of gold ... then you might have a better idea of where to start looking for the next gold mine.” molecules in cells. “We synthesise new compounds based on heavy metals that have luminescent properties,” explains Massi. “Then we feed the compounds to cells, and look to see where they accumulate and how they glow.”

The team synthesises libraries of designer chemicals for their trials.

“We know what properties we’re after – luminescence, biological compatibility and the ability to go to the part of the cell we want,” says Massi.

For example, compounds can be designed to accumulate in lysosomes – the tiny compartments in a cell that are involved in functions such as waste processing. With appropriate illumination, images of lysosomes can then be reconstructed and viewed in 3D using a technique known as confocal microscopy, enabling scientists to assess lysosome function. Similar approaches are in development for disease states such as obesity and cancer.

Beyond detection, this technique also has potential for therapeutic applications.

Massi has performed in vitro studies with healthy and cancerous cells, suggesting that a switch from detection to treatment may be possible by varying the amount of light used to illuminate the cells.

“A bit of light allows you to visualise.

A lot of light will allow you to kill the cells,” explains Massi. His approach is

NEW DIRECTION

Above: Scientists at Curtin’s Nanochemistry Research Institute investigate minerals at an atomic level, which can, for example, build an understanding of mineral loss in coral reefs.

on track for product development, with intellectual property protection filed in relation to using phosphorescent compounds to determine the health status of cells.

Improving approaches to cancer treatment is also an ongoing research activity for materials chemist Dr Xia Lou, who designs, constructs and tests nanoparticles for targeted photodynamic therapy, which aims to selectively kill tumours using light-induced reactive oxygen species.

“We construct hybrid nanoparticles with high photodynamic effectiveness and a tumour-targeting agent, and then test them in vitro in our collaborators’ laboratories,” she says. “Our primary interest is in the treatment of skin cancer. The technology has also extended applications in the treatment of other diseases.” Lou has successfully filed patents for cancer diagnosis and treatment that support the potential of this approach.

SPHERES AND OTHER 3D shapes constructed at the nanoscale offer

potential for many applications centred on miniaturised storage and release of molecules and reactivity with target materials. Dr Jian Liu in the Department of Chemical Engineering develops new synthesis strategies for silica or carbon spheres, or ‘yolk-shell’-structured particles. “Our main focus is the design, synthesis and application of colloidal nanoparticles including metal, metal oxides, silica and carbon,” says Liu. Most of these colloidal particles are nanoporous – that is, they have a lattice-like structure with pores throughout. The applications of such nanoparticles include catalysis, energy storage and conversion, drug delivery and gene therapy.

“The most practical outcome of our research would be the development of new catalysts for the production of synthetic gases, or syngas,” he says.

“It may also lead to new electrodes for lithium-ion batteries.” Once developed, nanoscale components for this type of rechargeable battery are expected to bring improved safety and durability, and lower costs. – Sarah Keenihan n

FORMALLY ESTABLISHED IN 2001, the Nanochemistry Research Institute began a new era in 2015 through the appointment of Professor Andrew Lowe as Director. Working under his guidance are academic staff and postdoctoral fellows, as well as PhD, Honours and undergraduate science students.

An expert in polymer chemistry, Lowe’s research background adds a new layer to the existing strong multidisciplinary nature of the Institute. “Polymers have the potential to impact on every aspect of fundamental research,” he says. “This will add a new string to the bow of Curtin University science and engineering, and open new and exciting areas of research and collaboration.”

Polymers are a diverse group of materials composed of multiple repeated structural units connected by chemical bonds. “My background is in water-soluble polymers and smart polymers,” explains Lowe. “These materials change the way they behave in response to their external environment – for example, a change in temperature, salt concentrations, pH or the presence of other molecules including biomolecules.

Because the characteristics of the polymeric molecules can be altered in a reversible manner, they offer potential to be used in an array of applications, including drug delivery, catalysis and surface modification.”

Lowe has particular expertise in RAFT dispersion polymerisation, a technique facilitating molecular self-assembly to produce capsule-like polymers in solution.

“This approach allows us to make micelles, worms and vesicles directly,” he says, describing the different physical forms the molecules can take. “It’s a novel and specialised technique that creates high concentrations of uniformly-shaped polymeric particles at the nanoscale.”

Such polymers are candidates for drug delivery and product encapsulation.

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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ENVIRONMENT

OCEANS OF WEALTH

As the driest inhabited continent, and the country with the sixth largest coastline, Australia is poorly endowed with freshwater but fringed by huge expanses of ocean. Curtin University is supporting crucial research in managing these precious resources

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W

E OFTEN TAKE IT FOR granted but access to clean drinking water is a critical issue in a growing number of regions around the world. In Perth, drinking water has traditionally been sourced from surface water dams and groundwater reserves.

But these supplies have significantly diminished since the 1980s through the combined impacts of rapid urban growth and protracted drought conditions. And with the southwest of Australia expected to suffer more severely than other parts of the continent from the impact of climate change, the situation is only expected to worsen.

The Water Corporation of Western Australia has been intensively exploring diversified options for boosting Perth’s drinking water, focusing on climate-independent sources. The most innovative option has been to use advanced treated wastewater to replenish groundwater resources impacted by the drying climate.

To help with their investigations, they turned to Curtin experts, including water chemist Dr Cynthia Joll. As Deputy Director of the Curtin Water Quality Research Centre (CWQRC), Joll is part of a team that researched the performance of the wastewater treatment procedures to make the process both safe and viable.

Joll explains there are a large number of potential micropollutants that might need to be removed from a city’s wastewater before it can be safely recycled as drinking water. These include residual

pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics, hormones and pain relief medications found in urine.

“The Centre developed the vast majority of the analytical methods for detecting these chemicals in treated wastewaters and then looked to see whether they were in secondary and tertiary – or advanced – treated wastewater,” says Joll.

The research ensured the WA Department of Health approved a pilot water recycling plant. The plant produced advanced treated wastewater of drinking quality, which was pumped into the groundwater aquifer. As a result, they completed a successful groundwater replenishment trial by the end of 2012, which was dubbed a “highly viable” option for securing WA’s drinking water supplies in the drying climate.

In late 2013, the WA government announced that groundwater replenishment was to go ahead as a major new climate-independent water source for Perth. It’s predicted that, by 2060, as much as 20% of Perth’s drinking water is likely to be supplied using this approach. The advanced treated wastewater will be used to replenish groundwater supplies that won’t be drawn for drinking purposes for decades. By the time it is added to Perth’s water supply and subjected to the drinking water treatment process, it will have been naturally filtered by passing through groundwater aquifers, Joll explains.

The CWQRC is also involved in a wide range of fundamental and

applied research into other water quality issues. For Joll, who’s been fascinated by water quality chemistry for many years, it’s been particularly thrilling as a scientist to be involved in work of such high public significance. “To help bring it to full scale has been fabulous,” she says, adding that the success of the research means the work of the CWQRC is creating interest in other regions around the world that are already, or are anticipating, experiencing drinking water limitations.

Ocean colour image from the MERIS instrument, European Space Agency (ESA).

Science and Engineering research at Curtin University

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ENVIRONMENT

ENGINEERS AT CURTIN are also working on a water supply issue. As drinking water is pumped into cities, or wastewater is pumped out, small bubbles can form as the result of a drop in pressure from falling supplies in reservoirs or fluctuations in wastewater usage. These bubbles can damage the pumps that control supply.

Dr Kristoffer McKee, a lead researcher in Curtin’s rotating machine health monitoring project, and colleagues are analysing the vibrations made by the bubbles as they form. When the bubbles enter a pump, the pump applies pressure to the liquid, causing the bubbles to pop (implode) which releases energy. At its peak, millions of bubbles pop within milliseconds of each other.

“This popping eats away at the metal on the ‘impeller’ blades in the pump,” says McKee. As a result, this phenomenon decreases the pump’s ability to apply pressure and push the liquid in the desired direction.

“It sounds like you’re pumping gravel.”

The process makes holes in the impeller blades, causing the pumps to seize up. But by the time technicians can detect the telltale sounds, the damage has already begun, says McKee. “It can cost many thousands of dollars to take a pump offline and change an impeller.” He says their approach has been to try to detect the start of the process, called cavitation, before damage becomes significant.

Building on the results of work by a University of Western Australia colleague, and in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology researchers, the Curtin University engineers placed accelerometers (sensors which measure acceleration associated with vibrations) on pumps in Queensland towns. They found they could use the data to map cavitation in

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3D to show how a pump changes as cavitation occurs, says McKee. “Once you see cavitation starting, you can stop your pump and make sure the pressure is correct,” he adds.

It’s early days yet and the work needs more field testing, but the research could cut industry costs significantly.

THE PUSH TO APPLY research outcomes is strong across Curtin, including in the field of marine and freshwater research. Much of this work is carried out at the university under the auspices of the Australian Sustainable Development Institute, which brings Curtin researchers together on research proposals that relate to sustainable development.

“It’s all about tackling the key issues facing society,” explains the Institute’s Executive Director, Mike Burbridge.

“We know that there’s increasing pressure on water and water resources.

The cross-disciplinary approach is hugely important at Curtin, but especially in the sustainability space.

Major innovations have come about

by taking ideas from one area and applying them in another.”

An interdisciplinary approach to solving oceanographic problems has become a hallmark of Curtin’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology (CMST), which fosters research connections across the university’s Departments of Imaging and Applied Physics, Applied Geology, and Environment and Agriculture, as well as with external organisations such as the Western Australian Energy Research Alliance, the Integrated Marine Observing System and the Australian Maritime College.

“It sets us apart from other marine science groups around Australia. We seem to have carved quite a niche for doing that within the Southern Hemisphere and beyond,” says Dr Christine Erbe, Director of the CMST. Erbe is working with a multidisciplinary team at the CMST within Curtin’s physics department in the area of bioacoustics to monitor and analyse the sounds made by marine animals and people at the beach (see News, p6).

In one project, researchers are looking at how to detect sharks in the water using

Above: Ocean colour image from the MODIS instrument, NASA. Right: Perth drinking water will be replenished with reclaimed and treated wastewater.

By 2060, as much as 20% of Perth’s drinking water is likely to be supplied by groundwater replenishment.

off-the-shelf sonar systems – the type used by private and commercial fishermen that work by emitting acoustic signals reflected off objects in the water. “Many of us have engineering and physics backgrounds and apply that to biology,” says Erbe.

Professor David Antoine, head of Curtin’s Remote Sensing and Satellite Research Group, applies his expertise in the opposite direction, combining his background as a biologist with the use of highly sophisticated physics techniques to interpret changes in ocean colour.

Ocean colour activity is affected by the amount and type of particulate matter present – from phytoplankton to sediment. This matter affects how light penetrates into, and is scattered by, water. It can be expressed in physical terms such as the absorption (how much light is taken in by the water itself, as well as the particles or dissolved substances it contains) and reflectance (how much light is being scattered back compared to how much enters at the surface).

“If you have strong absorption, the water will look darker and you will have less light coming out of the water,” explains Antoine. Less absorption results

in more scattering of light and different ocean hues. Understanding the changing spectral signatures that result from this play of light enables scientists to quantify, for example, amounts of phytoplankton – the tiny plants that float in ocean surface waters and drive marine food chains.

“Like terrestrial plant life, phytoplankton contains many pigments, particularly chlorophyll,” says Antoine. “And chlorophyll absorbs preferentially in the blue range on the visible light spectrum.”

As phytoplankton concentration increases in an area of ocean, the spectral signature of the water shifts from deep to light blue, then to green or brown, indicating a very large concentration of phytoplankton and highly productive waters. This can be measured in surface waters using an instrument called a radiometer – deployable from a ship, for example, or across huge areas via satellites.

While referred to as ‘satellite imagery’, it involves more than looking at nice pictures, Antoine says. His team is doing a rigorous quantitative analysis of the measured signal on each pixel of the

image to look at geophysical properties and determine attributes such as phytoplankton concentration. “That can mean millions of individual observations on just one image, and billions of them when many years of observations are collected over the entire planet.”

This kind of understanding can be applied, for example, in the local and global management of fish stocks, which rely on patterns of phytoplankton production. And because phytoplankton carry out photosynthesis – absorbing CO2 and releasing oxygen – understanding where, when and how much of this resource there is can provide vast amounts of information about the global carbon cycle. This, in turn, has major implications for managing climate change.

The potential significance of phytoplankton in this area is enormous, says Antoine, explaining that huge numbers of tiny plants floating across the world’s oceans act as a major sink for atmospheric carbon, sequestering around 50 gigatonnes of carbon per year. This is as much carbon fixation as is carried out by terrestrial plants, and the plankton uses about 500 times less biomass because it is more efficient at photosynthesis. A significant part of the CO2 released in the atmosphere by human activity is absorbed by this process and eventually sinks to the deep ocean and is buried in the ocean floor.

There’s perhaps no better indicator of how all of Earth’s habitats – marine, freshwater and terrestrial – are all intimately linked. – Karen McGhee n

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ASTRONOMY

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ACROSSTHESKIES The engineering challenges behind building the world’s biggest radio telescope are vast, but bring rewards beyond a better understanding of the universe

S

INCE ITS INCEPTION, the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy has established itself as an essential hub for astronomy research in Australia. Known as CIRA, the organisation brings together engineering and science expertise in one of Australia’s core research strengths: radio astronomy.

Through CIRA’s research node, Curtin is an equal partner in the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) with the University of Western Australia. Curtin also contributes staff to the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics. One of the core strengths of CIRA is the construction of next generation telescopes. These include work on one of the world’s biggest scientific endeavours, and Earth’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

CIRA’s Co-Directors, Professors Steven Tingay and Peter Hall, were on the team who pitched Australia’s successful bid to host part of the SKA – a radio telescope that will stretch across Australia and Africa. The SKA’s two hosting nations were announced in May 2012 and the project forms the main focus of research at CIRA. And for good reason: the SKA-low – a low-frequency aperture array consisting of a quarter of a million individual antennas in its first phase – will be built in Western Australia at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), about 800 km north of Perth.

The near-flat terrain and lack of radio noise from electronics and broadcast media in this remote region allow for great sky access and ease of construction. At Phase 1, SKA-low will cover the project’s lowest-frequency band, from 50 MHz up to 350 MHz – with antennas covering approximately 2 km at the core, stretching out to 50 km along three spiral arms.

“Out of 10 organisations in a similar number of countries, CIRA is the largest single contributor to the low frequency array consortium,” says Hall, the Director responsible for engineering at CIRA. Far from a traditional white dish radio telescope, which mechanically focuses beams, the SKA-low will be a huge array of electronic antennas with no moving parts. Its programmable signal processors will be able to focus on multiple fields of view and perform several different processes simultaneously. “You can point at as many directions as you want with full sensitivity – that’s the beauty of the electronic approach,” says Senior Research Fellow Dr Randall Wayth, an astronomer and signal processing specialist at CIRA. ONE OF THE MAJOR scientific goals of SKA-low is to help illuminate the events of the early universe, particularly the stage of its formation known as the

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ASTRONOMY

‘epoch of reionisation’. Around 13 billion years ago, all matter in the early universe was ionised by radiation emitted from the earliest stars. The record of this reionisation carries with it telltale radio signatures that reveal how those early stars formed and turned into galaxies.

Observing this directly for the first time will allow astronomers to unlock fundamental new physics.

“To see what’s going on there at the limits of where we can see in time and space, you have to have telescopes that are sensitive to wide-field, diffuse structures, and that are exquisitely calibrated. You have to be able to reject the foreground universe and local radio frequency interference,” says Hall.

This sensitivity to diffuse structures will make SKA-low and its precursor, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), essential instruments in studying the epoch of reionisation.

The SKA-low will also be important in studying time domain astronomy, which consists of phenomena occurring over a vast range of timescales. One example is the field of pulsar study. Pulsars are

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A computer visualisation of the close-packed core region of SKA-low Phase 1, showing a fraction of the 250,000 antennas.

incredibly dense rotating stars that, much like a lantern in a lighthouse, emit a beam of radiation at extremely regular intervals. This regularity makes pulsars useful tools for a variety of scientific applications, including accurate timekeeping.

By the time the radio signal from a distant pulsar travels across space and reaches Earth, it is dispersed.

But with the right telescope, you can calibrate against this dispersion, and trace back the original regular signal.

“One of the great things you can do with a low frequency telescope such as the SKA-low is get a very good look at the pulsar signal,” says Hall. “As well as stand-alone SKA-low pulsar studies, the measurement of hour-to-hour dispersion changes can be fed to telescopes at higher frequencies, vastly improving their ability to do precision pulsar timing.”

IT’S NOT JUST ASTRONOMY research that is benefiting from the construction of the SKA-low and its precursors (two precursor telescopes are in place at the MRO: the MWA and the Australian

Square Kilometre Array Precursor telescope, ASKAP). In order to make the most out of the aperture array telescopes, some fundamental engineering challenges need to be solved. Challenges such as how to characterise the antennas to ensure that they meet design specifications, or how to design a photovoltaic system to power the SKA without producing too many unwanted emissions. Solving these problems requires both a deep understanding of the fundamental physics involved as well as knowledge of how to engineer solutions around those physics.

The projected construction timeframe for SKA-low is 2018–2023, but there is already infrastructure in place to begin testing its design and operation.

Consisting of 2048 fixed dual-polarisation dipole antennas arranged in 128 ‘tiles’, the MWA boasts a wide field of view of several hundred square degrees at a resolution of arcminutes. It has provided insight into the challenges that will arise during the full deployment of SKA-low, not the least of which is managing the volume of data resulting from the measurements.

A SUPERCOMPUTER IN THE BACKYARD THE SCALE OF SKA, and the resultant flood of data, requires the rapid development of methods to process data. The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre – a purpose-built powerhouse named after pioneering Australian radio astronomer Dr Joe Pawsey and run by the Interactive Virtual Environments Centre (iVEC) – includes a supercomputer called Galaxy, dedicated to radio astronomy research. A key data challenge is finding ways in which the signal processing method can be split up and processed simultaneously, or ‘parallelised’, so that the full force of the supercomputing power can be used.

The proximity of the signal processing experts at CIRA to iVEC means that researchers can continually prototype new ways of parallelising the data, with the goal being to achieve real-time analysis of data streaming in from the SKA.

“The MWA already has a formidable data rate. We transmit 400 megabits per second down to Perth, and processing that is a substantial challenge,” says Wayth. The challenge is a necessary one, as the stream of data that comes from a fully operational SKA-low will be orders of magnitude larger.

“While doing groundbreaking science, the MWA is just manageable for us at the moment in terms of data rate. It teaches us what we have to do to handle the data.”

Continued CIRA developments at the MRO have included the construction of an independently commissioned prototype system, the Aperture Array Verification System 0.5 (AAVS0.5). The results from testing it in conjunction with the MWA surprised the engineers and scientists.

“Engineers know that building even a tiny prototype teaches you a lot,” says Hall.

In their case, some carefully-matched cables turned out to be mismatched in

their electrical delay lengths. Using the AAVS0.5, they have already been able to improve the MWA calibration. “We were able to feedback that engineering science into the MWA astronomy calibration model, and we now have a better model to calibrate and clean the images from the MWA,” says Hall.

Following the success of AAVS0.5, over the next two years CIRA will be leading the construction of the much larger AAVS1, designed to mimic a full SKA-low station.

DEVELOPING THE SKA-LOW and its precursors is an huge effort, demanding the best in astrophysics, engineering and data processing. CIRA is uniquely positioned to accomplish this feat, with a large research staff, fully equipped engineering laboratory and access to the nearby Pawsey Supercomputing Centre for data processing. “CIRA has

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre will manage the enormous volume of data collected

by SKA-low.

astronomers and engineers, as well as people who do both. We have all the skills to do these things in-house,” says Hall.

“It’s a big advantage having the critical mass of people in this building to make things happen,” says Wayth.

“It’s a rare case where the sum of the parts really is greater than the whole.”

Opportunities for students and early-career researchers to engage in the project are already underway.

Dozens of postgraduate research projects commencing in 2015 will involve the MWA, AAVS and ASKAP directly. Topics range from detecting the radio signature of fireballs to investigating the molecular chemistry of star formation. As well as producing novel scientific outcomes, these projects will feed valuable test data into the major scientific investigations slated for the SKA as it becomes operational.

– Phillip English n

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PROFILE

Immense Vision

N

O TWO DAYS ARE THE SAME for radio astronomer Professor Steven Tingay as he observes the skies using a $50 million telescope he and his team built in remote outback Western Australia. In any given week, Tingay might be discussing a galaxy census, monitoring solar flares for the US Air Force or investigating the beginning of the universe.

Tingay is the Director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy at Curtin University, Deputy Director of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and Director of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). Still less than two years old, the MWA has already entered uncharted territory, collecting data that will uncover the birth of stars and galaxies in the very early universe and produce an unprecedented galaxy catalogue of half a million objects in the sky. The MWA could also one day provide early warning of destructive solar flares that can knock out the satellite communications we rely on.

“To date, we’ve collected upwards of four petabytes of data and all the science results are starting to roll out in earnest now,” he says. “It’s an amazing feeling for the team to have pulled together, delivered the instrument, and to do things that no one ever expected we could do when we did the planning.”

The project sees Curtin University lead a prestigious group of partners, including Harvard University and MIT, in four countries. And while the MWA is a powerful telescope in its own right, it paves the way for what is arguably the biggest science project on the planet – the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

The promise of this multi-billion dollar telescope, which will be built across Western Australia and South Africa, drove Tingay to move to Perth seven years ago. “I like to be close to the action, building and operating telescopes, and using them to do interesting experiments that no one else has done before – in close physical proximity.”

His team of 55 researchers at Curtin University are working on the astrophysics, engineering and ICT challenges of the SKA. “Curtin is an amazing place to work,” he says. “It’s focused on a few very high-impact developments and making sure that they’re properly funded and resourced.

“Periodically, I sit down and think: ‘Where else in the world would I rather be?’ and every time I conclude that for radio astronomy Curtin University in Perth is the best place to be.”

– Michelle Wheeler n

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FACTS & FIGURES

CURTIN AT A GLANCE

3

303RD

Curtin is placed within the 301–400 band in the highly-regarded Academic Ranking of World Universities

NINE

>$15 million

The amount per annum generated by companies whose business is based on intellectual property developed

by Curtin researchers

Curtin has a range of technology-based opportunities – from very early stage projects to stand-alone, profitable companies. Curtin University has been actively involved in the establishment of 19 companies based on intellectual property resulting from its research.

These companies are rapidly growing, employing over 100 people and generating revenues in excess of $15 million per annum. They include Neuromonics, Scanalyse, Sensear, HiSeis, iCetana and Skrydata.

90

The number of Curtin campuses – including major campuses in Perth, Kalgoorlie, Singapore and Malaysia

The number of Curtin researchers in the Thomson Reuters list of Highly Cited Researchers 2014 in engineering and geoscience

82

nd

Curtin is ranked by The Times Higher Education (2014) as one of the world’s 100 top universities under 50 years old

The number of exchange partnerships Curtin has with universities in more than 20 countries

CURTIN’S 2014 QS WORLD UNIVERSITY RANKINGS BY SUBJECT • Number 40 in the world for earth and marine sciences • 51–100 for chemical engineering • 101–150 for environmental sciences, and civil and structural engineering • 151–200 for materials sciences, electrical and electronic engineering, computer science and information systems, and statistical and operational research

FOUR

Areas of expertise in research activities at Curtin, focusing on: • Minerals and energy • ICT and emerging technologies • Health • Sustainable development

60,000 AND GROWING Curtin had approximately 61,000 students in 2014 and 4,200 staff

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DIRECTORY

CURTIN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

RESEARCH INSTITUTES AND CENTRES Australia-China Joint Research Centre for Energy energy.curtin.edu.au Australian Director: Professor Chun-Zhu Li chun-zhu.li@curtin.edu.au Australia-China Joint Research Centre for Tectonics and Resources cibc.curtin.edu.au/contact.cfm Director: Professor Zheng-Xiang Li z.li@curtin.edu.au Centre for Crop and Disease Management ccdm.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Mark Gibberd m.gibberd@curtin.edu.au

Curtin Water Quality Research Centre cwqrc.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Jean-Philippe Croue jean-philippe.croue@curtin.edu.au Fuels and Energy Technology Institute (FETI) energy.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Chun-Zhu Li chun-zhu.li@curtin.edu.au

Centre for Infrastructural Monitoring and Protection structuraldynamics.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Hong Hao hong.hao@curtin.edu.au

John De Laeter Centre for Isotope Research jdlc.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Brent McInnes directorjdlc@curtin.edu.au

Centre for Marine Science and Technology cmst.curtin.edu.au Director: Dr Christine Erbe c.erbe@curtin.edu.au

Nanochemistry Research Institute nanochemistry.curtin.edu.au Interim Director: Professor Andrew Lowe andrew.b.lowe@curtin.edu.au

Curtin Corrosion Engineering Industry Centre corrosion.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Moses TadĂŠ m.o.tade@curtin.edu.au

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Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy astronomy.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Peter Hall p.hall@curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Steven Tingay s.tingay@curtin.edu.au

Centre of Excellence for High Definition Geophysics geophysics.curtin.edu.au/research/ chdg.cfm

Centre for Smart Grid and Sustainable Power Systems ece.curtin.edu.au/smartgrid Director: Professor Syed Islam s.islam@curtin.edu.au

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Curtin Institute for Computation computation.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Andrew Rohl a.rohl@curtin.edu.au

The Institute for Geoscience Research (TIGeR) tiger.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Andrew Putnis andrew.putnis@curtin.edu.au

RESEARCH GROUPS Clean Gas Technology Australia Research Group cleangas.curtin.edu.au Head: Professor Moses Tadé m.o.tade@curtin.edu.au Curtin Gold Technology Group mining.curtin.edu.au/research/gold Head: Professor Jacques Eksteen jacques.eksteen@curtin.edu.au Embedded Systems and System Technologies Research Group ece.curtin.edu.au/research Director: Dr Iain Murray i.murray@curtin.edu.au Fluid Dynamics Research Group fdrg.curtin.edu.au Leader: Professor Tony Lucey t.lucey@curtin.edu.au Geographic Information Science and Remote Sensing gis.curtin.edu.au/ Director: Professor Bert Veenendaal b.veenendaal@curtin.edu.au Global Navigation Satellite Systems Research Group gnss.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Peter Teunissen p.teunissen@curtin.edu.au

Publisher: Karen Taylor

Managing Editor: Heather Catchpole Production Editor: Heather Curry

Contributing Editor: Karen McGhee Art Director: Kat Power

Sub-editors: Keira Daley, Hall Greenland Additional sub-editing: Karen McGhee Writers: Rosslyn Beeby, Laura Boness, Gemma Chilton, Phillip English, Sarah Keenihan, Karen McGhee, Branwen Morgan, Cathal O’Connell, Clare Pain, Ben Skuse, Michelle Wheeler

Hydrogen Storage Research Group energy.curtin.edu.au/research Dean of Research: Professor Craig Buckley c.buckley@curtin.edu.au

Supercontinent Cycles & Global Geodynamics geodynamics.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Zheng-Xiang Li z.li@curtin.edu.au

Multiphase Flow through Porous Media Research Group petroleum.curtin.edu.au/research/ multi/

Sustainable Engineering Group seg.curtin.edu.au Director: Associate Professor Michele Rosano m.rosano@curtin.edu.au

Pavement Research Group civil.eng.curtin.edu.au/research/ pavement.cfm Head: Professor Hamid Nikraz h.nikraz@curtin.edu.au

Theoretical Physics Group itp.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Igor Bray igor.bray@curtin.edu.au

Petroleum Geomechanics Group petroleum.curtin.edu.au/ research/cpgg Head: Associate Professor Stefan Iglauer stefan.iglauer@curtin.edu.au

Unconventional Gas Research Group petroleum.curtin.edu.au/ research/ugrg Head: Professor Reza Rezaee r.rezaee@curtin.edu.au

Remote Sensing and Satellite Research Group remotesensing.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor David Antoine david.antoine@curtin.edu.au

WA-Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Group (WA-OIGC) wa-oigc.curtin.edu.au Director: Professor Kliti Grice k.grice@curtin.edu.au

WASM Mining Rock Mechanics rockmechanics.curtin.edu.au Head: Professor Ernesto Villaescusa e.villaescusa@curtin.edu.au Water and Environmental Engineering Research Group civil.eng.curtin.edu.au/research /water.cfm Head: Associate Professor Anna Heitz a.heitz@curtin.edu.au Western Australian Geodesy Group geodesy.curtin.edu.au Head: Professor Will Featherstone w.featherstone@curtin.edu.au

Sino-Australian Joint Research Centre for Ocean Engineering ocean.curtin.edu.au

Editorial & advertising offices: 97 Rose St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Sydney, Australia Phone: 02 9699 8999 Email: info@refractionmedia.com.au Postal address: PO Box 38, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012, Sydney, Australia Edge of Tomorrow is produced on behalf of Curtin University. Copyright © 2015 Curtin University, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner or form without written permission.

This issue went to press 17 April 2015.

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