Month: July 2016

Australia’s premier advanced manufacturing and machine tool exhibition, Austech 2017 will take place at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from 9-12 May 2017. As always, Austech will include an exciting range of special features, including specialised areas such as the Additive and Digital Manufacturing Pavilion and Manufacturer’s Pavilion. Preparations for the show are already in full swing, and a number of companies have already signed up as exhibitors. To ensure that the floor space is allocated fairly, AMTIL has always held a ballot among the companies who register early. There is still time to register as an Austech exhibitor and be included the in the ballot. It pays to book early and maximise your pre-show exposure. The Austech ballot is divided into groups: the first ballot includes exhibitors applying for 144sqm or…

Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) is commonly used for efficiency estimation. OEE is a function of Equipment Availability (A) and Equipment Performance (P), both expressed as percentages, and is calculated as follows: OEE = A x P Availability (A) reflects the impact of production time losses, and can be calculated as the ratio of the actual availability (the production time when equipment is making products) against the target availability (the production time originally scheduled): A = Aactual / Atarget Target availability is calculated as a time interval (usually in minutes) between the start and the finish of the scheduled production time, minus planned breaks for set-up, preventive maintenance, cleaning, lunch breaks and so on. Actual availability is calculated as the target availability, minus unplanned production time losses (such as equipment downtime and breakdowns). When actual time for planned activity (e.g. set-up) exceeds the allocated time, excess becomes a downtime. For example if 15 minutes is allowed for the line set-up and it actually took…

The annual Global Information Technology Report is based on extensive research conducted by the WEF and its network of over 160 partner Institutes. The Australian Industry Group Chief Executive Innes Willox said Australia clearly still has some way to go to return to the world’s top ten despite the roll-out of the National Broadband Network and efforts from across the political spectrum to improve our digital readiness. The Ai Group is the WEF’s Partner Institute in Australia “As an advanced economy, Australia ranks relatively poorly compared to its peers,” said Willox. “Indeed, there is a clear gap between the top seven ranked economies and other advanced economies. These countries (dominated by Singapore, northern Europe and the US) currently lead the way in embedding and leveraging digital technologies. Critically, they are characterised by a business sector that is embracing new digital technologies and innovations as core parts of operations. “For Australia, the 2016 result is disappointing especially at a time of economic and political…

AMT: Let’s start with your career background before joining UTS. Sam Bucolo: I started as an industrial designer working as a consultant, mainly for SME manufacturers. My frustration was that I kept getting the wrong brief from clients from these firms. Often they just wanted me to focus on a better manufacturing process or improved product aesthetics. As a designer, I used to tell them, this product does not meet the needs of your industry. You need to speak to your customers and find out their requirements. I worked in and out of academia and consulted to large multi-national international companies in Europe for a while and learnt a lot about corporate strategy. When I returned to Australia, I worked for the Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) for Interaction Design. It was interesting work but highlighted the challenges of getting good ideas and research to market. If you look at traditional research commercialisation, it often starts with a product, then businesses seek investors and develop, promote and…

Make it Cheaper has looked at power bills for 33 customers and a total of 56 meters. Those 56 meters were split across Commercial & Industrial, SME and Residential – Make It Cheaper is capable of offering advice and quotations across all three of these markets. Where it is possible to make an actual prediction of retrospective savings based on usage and the availability of the bill to perform a full bill comparison, the company has been able to save AMTIL members a total of $18,793 per year. Across the SME market this averages at $1,708 per meter switched where a better deal has been identified, and the highest estimated savings come in at a whopping $7,218. The even better news is that there are still many, many members of AMTIL that haven’t yet taken advantage of this great service. Remember this service is free, and realistically it will take five to ten minutes of your time. Of course, time is always tight, and your…

Long-time AMTIL member Archer Enterprises, a precision engineering firm based in Somersby, NSW, is one company that has observed a noticeable drop in the standard of project management across a number of industries, and it is having a negative impact on product development. “We’re aware that companies have been downsizing since the GFC and now we are seeing the consequences of that change,” says Archer’s Operations Director Russell Byrne. “The people who drove product development and managed it properly, the technicians and the project managers, are missing.” Byrne adds that without people filling those strategic roles, the quality of project scopes of work has worsened. “We are seeing junior staff, project officers and in some cases senior executives who don’t have the right technical or management skills being given responsibility to run projects,” he explains. “They approach us with ill-informed intentions and minimal information. We do step in and guide them; that is a normal part of our technology relationship. But the added assistance they require from us has sometimes meant rewriting the scope of…

This is due to new processes made possible by equipment developed specifically for the purpose by Andrew Engineering. Driven by the flexibility and precision of the SEW-Eurodrive Movidrive B drive inverter, the latest bogie exchange system (BES) enables faster, safer and more economical turnaround in railway maintenance sheds throughout Australia. Changing bogies is a demanding business. According to Neil Boehringer, Project Manager at Andrew Engineering, when traditional methods are used, it takes a team of maintenance workers an hour and a half for each changeover. Using the new BES, a single operator can remove and replace a set of bogies and have the train ready within 45 minutes! This makes it easy to carry out maintenance on the wheels or other components away from the train. Precise movements The older methods rely on jacking the whole train up or working from below in specially constructed pits, but thanks to the precise movements controlled by the Movidrive…

Although tapping remains the most common internal threading generation process, the highly efficient thread milling technique has ended tapping’s dominance of as the main method of cutting threads in relatively small diameter holes. Even though tapping is considered highly productive with some obvious pros, this traditional method also has evident cons. The main problem encountered when performing tapping is chip evacuation. A long chip can clog the flute of a tap, which may cause the tap to break in a hole, and possibly cause an entire machined part to be scrapped. However, when performing thread milling, effective chip evacuation is achieved without difficulty. Material hardness is another common impediment to efficient tapping. Although the majority of today’s taps are not suitable for machining hard materials, thread mills produced from solid carbide considerably expand the range of hard materials that are able to be tapped. Thread milling delivers outstanding versatility. For instance, a single multiple-form thread mill is able…

The cost-saving universal chute – which can rotate output through 160 degrees left or right – can remove completely the need to custom-manufacture individual chute types to fit the confined spaces and particular angles of individual mines. The versatile bolt-in system – comprising a complete integrated structure from head end to conveyor outlet – features a rotating outlet beneath the head that can be angled to any position required to facilitate product flow. In addition to radically reducing the labour required for manufacture and installation, the chute’s ability to be installed in a fraction of the time of custom chutes minimises downtime by keeping production moving when chutes wear out. “This is a brilliantly simple breakthrough in cost and time saving at a time when the mining industry needs it most to maintain production,” says Chute Technology partner Tom Woods, whose experience of coal chute manufacture through family company TW Woods Construction extends back more than 40…

The result completes a full year of continuous expansion – the equal longest unbroken period of growth for the Australian PMI since September 2006. Five of the seven activity sub-indexes expanded in June, with the strong performance of production (up by 3.5 points to 54.4), new orders (up by 1.9 points to 54.1) and sales (down by 2.2 points to 53.7) boding well for future months (see table below). “The mild expansion of manufacturing in June capped a year in positive territory for the Australian PMI,” said Ai Group Chief Executive Innes Willox. “It was a year in which manufacturers took advantage of the boost to competitiveness from the lower Australian dollar both in the domestic market and in export markets.” Six of the eight manufacturing sub-sectors expanded (that is, above 50 points in three-month moving averages), led by petroleum & chemical products (up 2.2 points to 62.1) and non-metallic mineral products (up 6.8 points to 58.3). Wood & paper products (down 10.0…

“All fabricated steel being erected in Australia must be certified as compliant with the standards and the standards must be enforced,” Crittenden said. Crittenden added that he had received copies of documentation that show a grain silo under construction in a rural Australian location, which he would not identify, is being built from imported fabricated steel modules that are not compliant. Crittenden said a WTIA-certified senior welding inspector’s report showed ten separate items tested did not comply. Problems identified included undersize, missing and incomplete welds. A separate qualified consultant’s visual weld inspection of the imported silo support structure found none of the welds inspected was compliant with the Australian standard, AS/NZS 1554.1:2014. According to the report, the welds are “deemed unacceptable”. Both reports include photographs that clearly show the sub-standard welds. “Despite the serious safety issues raised in these reports, my understanding is construction is proceeding with no rectification of the non-compliant welds,” Crittenden said. “Compliance with Australian standards is not mandatory and there is…

With the mining boom having come to an end, manufacturing will carry a greater share of the load as the economy turns to other industries for growth. Over the past decade, the rising prominence of imports in the domestic market has placed significant pressure on the industry. However, the depreciation of the Australian dollar has provided some support for our manufacturers, making the products made in this country more affordable abroad, as well as making imported products less competitive. Nevertheless, the domestic manufacturing sector continues to face strong headwinds. With labour costs that are among the highest in the world, Australia is not strategically suited to compete in the mass manufacturing industry against low-cost manufacturing bases such as China. On the other hand, Australia is very well equipped to cater to the manufacture of products that require complex and customised designs. Additive manufacturing is an ideal tool in facilitating such forms of production. Frost & Sullivan’s recently completed research report…

The coaxial welding cladding head allows complete X/Y/Z-direction independent cladding with filler wire. Based on a unique internal optical design, it splits in half, then rejoins the beam at the cladding position and is combined with the coaxial feeding of the additional filler wire material. The wire is then fused from all directions at the local melt pool to the base substrate. In comparison to laser cladding with powder, a very high material efficiency is possible, since the additional material is introduced and processed at 100%. The process is also cleaner, highly stable and simple to integrate and adjust. The homogenous energy distribution in the fully circular focus enables a large process window, which results in a stable process, even if the working distance fluctuates a little. This proves advantageous particularly for the construction of free-formed 2.5D structures. The Precitec CoaxCladder allows application across a wide range of fields, such as the repair of high-value components, adding specialised wear-resistance coatings, or the building of high-volume structures. The efficient process allows very high processing speeds, up to 5m per…