Advanced manufacturing

Our researchers make a unique contribution to the design of new products and they make existing ones work better by improving or altering the materials and technologies involved.

This could be in the making of lighter weight components, or materials that can produce or store energy. It is creating devices that can filter water or remove the salt from it. Whatever the application, our focus is on making "smart" technologies that are able to sense their environment - be it in the bottom of the ocean or inside the human body.

The tools we use to take innovations from experimental processes through to application cover the range of modern engineering techniques, all the way from the atomic scale, through the nanoscale, to the industrial scale.

Infrastructure

Our researchers and industry partners have access to unique, large-scale facilities, including:

• Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy
• The Australian Synchrotron
• OPAL Nuclear Reactor
• Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication

We have many different devices and techniques to process, treat, characterise and test materials and devices. We have access to considerable computer power, including super-computers, which can be accessed by researchers modeling and simulating materials and processes.

Working with industry

Monash has a long history of working with companies in a number of leading-edge areas through a range of funding mechanisms, including Linkage Project grants, cooperative research centres and as contract research.

This includes working with companies to make:

• lighter engines to reduce fuel consumption and noxious emissions
• bottles out of renewable plastics from plants, not petrochemicals
• cheap solar cells that can be printed like plastic money on polymer substrates
• large components for the aerospace industry
• improved magnets
• 'direct to brain' bionic eye to improve sight for people who are blind due to conditions such as glaucoma, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy

Contributing capabilities

• Advanced polymer science and engineering
• Advanced light alloys
• Adsorption processes
• Biomaterials and tissue engineering
• Biochemical engineering
• Chemical reactor engineering
• Coal conversion processes
• Corrosion
• Electronic and magnetic materials
• Engineering alloys
• Materials characterisation
• Medical bionics
• Modelling and simulation of materials and processes
• Nanostructured materials and membranes
• Particle technology
• Rheology
• Structural and functional ceramics
• Solar cells
• Surface coatings
• Solid-liquid separation
• Thermomechanical processing