Month: August 2015

Released in June, PwC’s 12th annual global report, Mine 2015: The Gloves Are Off, painted a gloomy picture for the global mining industry. The overall market values of the world’s 40 largest mining companies plummeted by US$156bn last year, a 16% fall, while net profit was down by 9%. The financial results were driven by continued pressure on commodity prices, with iron ore, coal and copper prices falling 50%, 26% and 11% respectively throughout 2014. The slide has continued into 2015, with a 12% drop in the price of iron ore in the first third of the year, and a 5% and 6% drop for coal and copper. How is this downturn affecting the METS industry in Australia? According to Christine Gibbs Stewart, CEO of Austmine, the fall is having a highly detrimental impact. Throughout April, May and early June, Austmine, Australia’s peak body for the METS industry, surveyed 432 businesses in the sector.…

It is a fair assumption that most companies nowadays engage in international business activities in some capacity. This may involve importing products from overseas to sell domestically, it may involve selling products and services overseas, or it may even involve paying foreign employees in their domestic currency. The volatility and movements in exchange rates can have a major impact on the bottom line of a business, and ultimately for its overall survival. Many factors can cause the market to fluctuate, such as the RBA cutting interest rates or employment figures showing increased unemployment in a certain country. If data releases are dramatically different from economists’ forecasts the exchange rate of associated currencies can move dramatically in a matter of seconds. Political factors are also a huge driver for currency movements, such as elections or wars breaking out in certain regions. There are a number of ways that businesses can protect themselves from undesirable rate moves. One of these is the timing of execution, for example…

The new Konecranes unit complements three other existing CXT cranes used in lifting and moving steel for Adsteel, which has an excellent network of suppliers and steel mills both in Australia and overseas. Adsteel supplies plate, sheet, tubular, structural and merchant bar among its broad range. High-quality customer service has been a key focus of its success for over 20 years and dealing with companies that share its vision of greater efficiency and safety has helped it achieve this. “In the steel industry, service is everything,” says Steve Trowbridge, Operations Manager at Adsteel. “I was looking to upgrade an old workshop crane, but after thorough research, a cost-benefit analysis and a business impact evaluation, we concluded that it would be more cost-efficient to install a new crane. Konecranes were really thorough and clearly had a lot of expertise in the steel industry.” Konecranes’ Branch Manager for Northern Territory and South Australia, John Jackman, explained that, to get optimum…

Re-Engineering Australia has drawn on the business relationships it has developed around the world over the past 30 years and asked them to open their doors for 200 lucky young Australians. It aims to guide and mentor students to help them understand what is possible. Re-Engineering Australia wants to excite students by bringing them face to face with the best technology in the world, and the senior executives responsible for running the organisations using this technology. This will be the 12th time that Re-Engineering Australia has taken a delegation of Australian students overseas but only the second complete round-the-world STEM Education tour. The tour is being planned for the mid-year school holidays in 2016 over a three-to-four week period and as Re-Engineering Australia finalises the details it is looking for schools that may be interested in participating. The trip will take in destinations such as: the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland; the Hyundai Heavy Industries Shipyard in South Korea;…

An easy, typical solution is to hold the individual parts with a side gauge or some other tool that will keep the operator’s hands at a safe distance from the machine. This improves safety and somewhat reduces the likelihood of wasted parts, but is a very inefficient method for productivity. A better solution is chain cutting and group bending. With chain cutting, fabricators can cut out the periphery of a group of the smaller parts, but keep them tabbed together in a chain, or to a carrier strip (see Image 1). The phrase “group bending” means that operators bend the full chain of parts as one piece, rather than as individual parts. There are numerous tabbing methods to achieve group bending. Chain cutting and group bending are safer and more…

Surdex Steel started life in 1952, when Reg Geary opened a small steel warehouse on Sydney Road in Brunswick, north of Melbourne. Geary’s initial emphasis was on building products, but the company soon diversified into a broader range of structural steel and sheet and coil. Meanwhile the business grew steadily, taking on premises in nearby Campbellfield, Keysborough and then Wodonga. In 1988 Surdex was acquired by the Southern Steel Group, based in Sydney, and further expansion followed in locations such as Shepparton, Bendigo, Warrnambool, Geelong and Morwell. Around ten years ago Surdex purchased a plate-profiling business in Dandenong South, while moving into a purpose-built headquarters nearby. Today the company operates from 11 sites located around Victoria or just across the New South Wales border in Albury, and employs around 200 personnel – a number that’s remained impressively stable despite difficult market conditions in the years since the global financial crisis (GFC). Surdex distributes steel products throughout Victoria (with each of the other states covered by sister…

There are two key types of process used for commercial purposes in metal additive manufacturing. One is the powder bed system or selective laser melting (SLM), which uses a layered process as an initial build; the other is laser melted deposition (LMD), where metal powder is simultaneously fed and melted through a guided laser nozzle building onto an original product to create new functions or repairing worn parts. Both processes offer advantages to additive manufacturers and both are radical departures from the traditional subtractive manufacturing process, presenting challenges and requiring a paradigm shift in thinking. The advantages are already being experienced, as David Joyce, CEO and president of GE Aviation, stated in March: “I think what additive gives us is a whole different degree of freedom on how we think about component design. We no longer have to understand what the limits of machining are.” To…

The first and most basic step in planning a milling operation is choosing a milling cutter and cutting inserts or cutting edges designed to produce the features desired on a part. Tooling suppliers offer face mills, end mills, disk mills and other cutters in roughing or finishing geometries engineered to produce nearly any required part feature. Whatever cutter is employed, in operation its cutting edges will repeatedly enter and exit the workpiece material. Loads on the milling teeth go from zero before entry, to peak values during the cut, and back to zero at exit. The goal is to moderate the intermittent loads of the milling process and thereby maximise tool life, productivity and process reliability. Cutter positioning, entry and exit strategies, and control of chip thickness are the key elements that lead to achievement of the goal. Approaching the workpiece Loads on the cutting tools in milling are determined…

Using advanced photonics, Dr Agneszka Zuber and Associate Professor Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem’s method can find gold nanoparticles at detection limits a hundred times lower than current methods such as X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and X-ray Fluorescence (XRF). “We are working on two optical methods. One of them uses fluorescence and the other is absorption,” says Dr Zuber. “The most popular methods are XRF and XRD. These methods work but the problem is the level of detection is quite high - around five to ten parts per million. It means that some ore deposits can just be missed. Our aim is to detect gold in parts per billion.” The project could save explorers from missed opportunities when drilling for gold. It’s a timely project, as gold isn’t limited to use in jewellery – it’s an increasingly important and in-demand component in electronics and medical devices. Dr Zuber and Associate Professor Ebendorff-Heidepriem have already been able to detect trace amounts down to 70 parts per billion…

There are many kilometres of pipe on oil platforms, complex chemical plants, refineries and large power stations. In view of these quantities, pipe fitting plays a special role in plant and pipeline construction; the conduit system must be installed quickly and efficiently. Moreover, these constructions are essential for the function and efficiency of the plants. A cursory glance at an oil pumping facility shows the central challenge clearly: the pipes form a highly complex network and the conduit system inevitably includes many bends. As such, a large number of different formed pipe bends in a variety of dimensions, forms and angles are used in the piping installation. These components need to be welded to the straight, long pipes on the construction site to form the desired pipeline. As a result, these processes represent considerable costs in the construction of these plants. First, the curved elements must be produced in advance, is some cases at an off-site facility. Second, these components must be…

Perhaps you need a specific component made, but you just don’t have the capabilities in-house. Maybe your company is involved in a big project, but your workshop or your workforce just isn’t big enough to handle the volume required on its own. Or maybe your business is diversifying into an area where the expertise you have available within the company is not sufficient. Sometimes finding an organisation that can help is the hardest part of the problem, and that’s precisely where HotSpots can simplify the process. HotSpots is a service specifically for AMTIL members, providing information and resources concerning our industry and the workplace, as well as various useful services for your business. Many of the items featured are available exclusively to our members only. HotSpots is designed to connect AMTIL members, informing them of the sorts of opportunities that could help their businesses to grow. In July alone, AMTIL Hotspots provided details of a design company which was looking for a…

As an apprentice I can remember blunt, rusty, threaded shank high-speed steel slot drills tucked away in a corner of the machine shop. No one would dare throw them away in case they could be reused. The truth was they would gather in a pile mixed with swarf until someone was annoyed by the cluttered mess and they would be thrown out. For most modern machine shops, the need to chase cycle time has taken precedent over hoarding (we hope). The humble endmill has also evolved. It has proven to be an asset in any productive machine shop. Its ability to remove metal with speed, accuracy and long tool life gives it an advantage over its indexable counterparts. With such a variety of styles, brands and price points to choose from, what makes a “high-performance” endmill different to its “general-purpose” relative? This article will give you a simple overview of the difference between basic and high-performance endmills, and how to tell the difference. The main influences of design…

AMT: Let’s start with your background and how you came into your current role. Geoffrey Brooks: I started originally in chemical engineering. After I graduated I started working in a lot of small companies that were building and making and fabricating things. I got involved with all sorts of things; I ran a plastic fabrication business for a while. After a few years of that I did a PhD in pyrometallurgy (the science of making metals), and most of my research in the last 20 years has been in that area. I’ve worked in Canada, the USA, and I’ve been at Swinburne for the last 10 years. Personally I’m a specialist in the science of making steel, and I’ve also done a lot of work in aluminium and magnesium. A few years ago the university asked me to take over the role of co-ordinating all the manufacturing research at the university. And Swinburne has a lot of manufacturing research across all sorts of areas: IT, electric vehicles, nano-materials – it’s a very broad…