Engineering to the rescue: Our role in humanitarian and disaster relief Graduate Profile

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Engineering to the rescue: Our role in humanitarian and disaster relief

Graduate Profile: Dr Chris Roberts

No 1 ranking for Engineering

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Diary note:Faculty of Engineering Alumni Anniversary DinnerCelebrating the graduation classes of 1956, 1966, 1976, 1986 and 1996

Friday 15 September 2006, 7.00pm for 7.30pm

The Roundhouse, UNSW Kensington Campus

$75 per person (includes pre-dinner drinks, three-course dinner, and wine/beer/soft drinks)

Lounge suit / Evening attire

Partners and guests welcome

Contact Luciano Ferracin, Development Officer on tel 02 9385 5364 or email [email protected]

UNSW Engineers is published by the Faculty of Engineering, UNSW.Phone +61 2 9385 4023Fax + 61 9385 5456Email [email protected]

EditorMary O’MalleyLayout and Production Co-ordinatorMarjorie Fox-OwensPhotography byThe Faculty of Engineering, Schools of the Faculty of Engineering, Gasbag Studios, and contributors.Printed byRostone Print

ISSN 1442-8849

[cover image] UNSW’s Dr Ian Turner at Sennen Beach, Cornwall UK, during the first deployment of new research instrumentation to measure rapid sand-level changes on beaches. Photo courtesy of Dr Turner.

contents3 News

5 Achievements Blast from the past

6 Feature story – Engineering to the rescue: Our role in humanitarian and disaster relief

12 School snapshots

18 Where in the world?

19 Graduate profile: Dr Chris Roberts

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� UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 13/June 2006

NEWS Back together on campus after 50 years

The second group of engineers to graduate from UNSW’s Kensington Campus have reunited at the University for the first time since receiving their degrees in 1956.

Electrical engineer Clifford Johnstone organised the group’s first official get together at Sydney’s League’s Club in 1981.

Fifty eight people, including 19 alumni, congregated in April for a convivial Golden Jubilee luncheon at the John Niland Scientia building.

Touring the modern campus with its state-of-the-art labs, the graduates couldn’t help but reflect on the campus of their day. In 1956, the campus had one main building, with huts along High Street used for student accommodation. Lectures were still held in the old Sydney Institute of Technology at Ultimo.

Electrical Engineering graduate Ronald McCarthy shared many happy memories of his University years. After captaining the University cricket team, Ronald McCarthy went on to be Chief State Engineer at Telecom for seven years, with more than 300 reporting to him. Ron has since worked in research and development innovation for Telecom and on the Visiting Committee for UNSW. He credits his knowledge of creativity and innovation

to his tertiary engineering background.

Ron carries a photo of the 1956 Engineering Graduation and Graduation Ball where he proposed to his wife, Jann McCarthy, who also attended the Golden Jubilee Luncheon.

When chemical engineer Alban Lynch studied engineering in the 50s there were no girls. Two of his daughters are chemical engineers but he stresses that it was entirely their choice. He has seven children, three of whom are engineers, and 21 grandchildren.

Alban converted his diploma to a degree and also attained his Masters qualification at the University’s Broken Hill Campus. He worked for Zinc Corporation (now Rio Tinto) for five years, working in the mine by day and studying by night.

Alban planned to obtain his doctorate at the University of Queensland and move to Weipa but ended up staying at UQ for 35 years where he founded the University’s Mineral Research Centre. He won a centenary medal in 2003 for service to Australian

society in mineral science and engineering.

These days he continues to develop research groups as a Visiting Professor in Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey. He and wife Barbara – whose family are long-term residents of Broken Hill – are both interested in archaeology so Turkey suits them well.

Alban reflects that while it was not a bed of roses, the 1956 graduates received great training. “ We can each look back with some considerable satisfaction that we were part of a group of people that each contributed our little bit to the prosperous country that we are today. We have watched with admiration how the University of New South Wales has developed”, says Alban.“We, the Faculty and the University are proud of the achievements of our graduates especially you who were among the first to put UNSW Engineers at the forefront of the profession and the general public”, says Tony Robinson (former Associate Dean, International.

From the DeanWatching the dramatic events of the Beaconsfield mine disaster, one could not help but reflect on the role engineering plays in such rescue situations. As Professor Hebblewhite points out on page 11, the rescue highlighted the ingenuity of mining engineering, the extraordinary people skills and the advances in technology

that led to the essential communication link with the two men and their ultimate safe removal from the collapsed mine.

Humanitarian and disaster-relief engineering is the theme of our special feature this issue. We explore the invaluable role played by organisations such as RedR, Engineering Aid and Engineers without Borders, examine the vital role that engineers play when chaos reigns and question what more as a profession we can do to highlight the value of engineering in both the prevention and alleviation of disasters.

I noted with interest a study at an American University, in which researchers are looking to nature – specifically, to ants, bees and viruses – for ways to improve human collaboration during disaster relief efforts.

The research team, which includes biological, computer and social scientists and civil engineers, will apply their natural-world findings to three major areas: collaboration among organisations involved in disaster-relief efforts; the use of information technology to support preparedness, response and recovery tasks; and the emerging role of civil engineers as key first responders to disasters.

They say the civil engineer’s role – particularly the engineers and contractors who were involved with the original design and construction of the critical physical infrastructure – needs to be extended beyond infrastructure life-cycle management and sustainability to also involve first response against disasters.

Engineers of all specialisations have much to offer this valuable work. I hope you find the feature food for thought and enjoy the reading elsewhere in the issue.

Professor Brendon ParkerDean, Faculty of Engineering

Left to right: Dr Alban Lynch AO, AM, Clifford Johnstone, Ronald McCarthy and John Coyle. The class of 1956 at the reunion lunch in April.

In their final year, the Electrical undergrads challenged the academic staff to a cricket match. Tossing the coin with the staff captain are (from left) Kevin Cleary, John Crowe, Ronald McCarthy and John Coyle. Photo courtesy of Ronald McCarthy.


achievements blast from the pastNEWS We’re Number 1Those who visit our website may have noticed this distinctive red logo appearing of late. It proclaims our great international standing.

The Faculty of Engineering has been named the best engineering school in Australia and ranked the 16th best in the world in the UK’s 2005 Times Higher Education Supplement World University Rankings.

In the first of a series of faculty-level analyses, the UK’s most authoritative higher education publication examined the top 100 institutions for engineering and technology.

UNSW Engineering rose from 29th to 16th place, ahead of Melbourne (18); Monash (24); Australian National University (29) and Queensland (40).

Alumni honour a mentor A seven-year campaign by UNSW alumni to establish a chair in the name of their former mentor finally has paid off. With the help of a generous $500,000 donation from U.S.-based QUALCOMM Incorporated, former students have succeeded in establishing the John Lions Chair in Operating Systems 2006.

Former students John O’Brien, Greg Rose, Steve Jenkin, Chris Maltby and others have worked over the years to raise the money in honour of the former professor and author of a controversial book on UNIX systems.

Greg Rose, vice president of technology for QUALCOMM and John O’Brien, managing director of Whitesmiths Ltd, donated substantial sums of

their own money in a bid to raise the funds for the Chair. “This is the first time that a group of alumni have established a Chair through their own efforts and I applaud their dedication and tenacity,” said UNSW’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Mark Wainwright.

Tyree ScholarshipElectrical engineering students now have access to an $8500 scholarship sponsored by the A.W. Tyree Foundation.

The A. W. Tyree Foundation Undergraduate Engineering Linkage Scholarship, offered every four years, is designed to assist high-achieving students undertake the Bachelor of Engineering program at UNSW’s Kensington Campus. The scholarship recipient will also be invited to undertake industrial training with Tyree Holdings over the summer break of each year of study.

Ms Robbie Fennell, daughter of Sir William Tyree and sister of Peter Tyree, chair of the Dean’s Advisory Committee, announced the scholarship at a signing ceremony attended by senior university staff.

Sir William Tyree has close links with the University, with one of the most popular venues in the Scientia building named after him.

Boost for indigenous engineersThe University of New South Wales has gained a new scholarship to help boost the numbers of indigenous students studying engineering.

At a graduation dinner for January’s 9th Indigenous Australian Engineering Summer School, Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells announced the establishment of a new $30,000 IAESS/Engineering Aid scholarship which UNSW will boost with additional funds.Twenty students attended this year’s summer school, an annual event sponsored by non-profit organisation Engineering Aid with the support of industry.

World ranking for photovoltaics inventorsProfessors Martin Green and Stuart Wenham have been ranked among the world’s best inventors in the European Inventor of the Year awards.

The UNSW developers of the world’s most efficient solar cells were among the top three contenders for a prize in the non-European inventors category.

“There were 200,000 patents ... in our category, so being ranked in the top three is rather amazing,” says Professor Wenham.

Edgeworth-David medalChristopher Barner-Kowollik based in the Centre for Advanced Macromolecular Design (CAMD) in the School of Chemical Engineeering and Industrial Chemistry, has been awarded the Edgeworth-David Medal by the Royal Society of NSW. This award is for distinguished research contributions by a scientist under the age of 35 years. Interestingly, the winner of this award, exactly 20 years ago, is our current Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), Professor Les Field.

Solar leader repeatsFellowship successProfessor Martin Green has been awarded one of this year’s prestigious ARC Federation Fellowships, making him one of the first researchers to receive this honour for the second time.

The Federal Government’s ARC Federation Fellowships are the most esteemed, publicly funded fellowships offered in Australia. They are designed to attract world-class research talent to Australia, and provide opportunities for leading Australian researchers to continue their work in this country.

Scientia Professor Green, Executive Research Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Advanced Silicon Photovoltaics and Photonics at UNSW, will lead research into nanostructured silicon-based tandem solar cells.

Professor Green aims to develop a new generation of

low-cost silicon solar cells that can be expected to significantly reduce the costs of generating electricity from sunlight, help to create new opportunities for Australian industry and contribute to a cleaner environment.

Snapped up by Google Google, one of the world’s biggest players in the internet business, has bought the rights to a search engine tool developed by PhD student Ori Allon from the School of Computer Science and Engineering.

The California-based company has also hired Allon, the creator of the advanced search engine set to revolutionise the way we can efficiently acquire information from the internet.

The technology allows the display of information from web sites directly, without users having to click through to separate pages. It also displays search results for topics related to the user’s query.

Though working in Mountain View, California, Ori Allon is still a full-time student at UNSW and will continue working on the invention with supervisor Dr Eric Martin for his PhD.

Spark a thought?Era? Definitely seventies. But not much else is known about this treasure from the Archives. Who can explain what this group is doing and who they are? We’d love to know where they are now. Email us at [email protected]

The late John Lions: Honored by his former students.

Robbie Fennell with Vice-Chancellor Professor Mark Wainwright.

Governor-General Michael Jeffery on a site visit with Indigenous students.

The late John Lions (left, standing) was a pioneer of computing and was one of the key people responsible for the growth of expertise in operating systems design across the world. He was a member of the UNSW academic staff for almost 25 years. Anyone know who else is in the photo?

email us: [email protected]

Ori Allon: Snapped up by Google. Photos courtesy of UNSW Archives.


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Engineering to the rescueOur role in Humanitarian and disaster relief >

Earlier this year, a catastrophic landslide buried the village of Guinsaugon, near the town of St Bernard in the Southern Leyte province of the Philippines. Spreading for more than three kilometres, the landslide killed an estimated 1000 people in a village of 1400, including 250 children and teachers in the local school. Tragically, many people from as far away as Manila were in Guinsaugon at the time to celebrate the anniversary of a local livelihood project.

UNSW alumna, environmental engineer Kathryn Harries, was quickly on the scene. A plant manager at Sydney Water’s Warriewood Sewage Treatment Plant, Kathryn is on the RedR (Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief) register. Run by Engineers Australia, RedR is a non-government humanitarian agency whose mandate is to select and train technical specialists to be available at short notice to work with the UN or non-government agencies.

In this case, AusAID immediately responded to the disaster, pledging $1 million and sending a team of engineers with expertise in geotechnical engineering, water and sanitation. With Kathryn’s previous experience in the Philippines through Red Cross and her role as national convenor of the Australian Water Association’s Water and Sanitation in Developing Communities Special Interest Group, she was selected as a water and sanitation (WatSan) expert.

“I was the only WatSan technical expert in the field at the time, so I was able to assist local non- government organisations develop water and sanitation recommendations.” says Kathryn. “This included developing a spreadsheet that could be used as an ongoing tool to provide fair distribution of additional latrines as evacuee numbers and the need for latrines changed. My highlight was consulting with the local rural sanitation inspectors while developing emergency latrine design.”

The whole field of humanitarian and disaster relief engineering has come a long way since the days when engineers flew in with the attitude of “we’re the white people, we see the problem, here’s the solution, see you later,” says

Dr Alistair Sproul, a senior lecturer in UNSW’s School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering and the leader on many student projects in developing and disaster-ridden countries.

“We tend to now ask, ‘How can we be of service to you? What needs solving?’” says Alistair, who with students has brought solar lighting to a remote medical outpost in Nepal, solar-powered water pumps to tsunami-affected Sri Lanka, and solar cooking facilities in Nicaragua. “People without a lot of money can have a huge impact and whether it’s a positive or negative experience depends on consultation. Working with the local community is crucial.”

It is an approach endorsed wholeheartedly by Jeff Dobell, founder of RedR Australia, Engineering Aid and RedR International in cooperation with RedR UK. He has dedicated much of his career to providing engineers and related services to assist disadvantaged communities both in Australia and overseas. Jeff believes not just in consulting local communities but in training local people as well.

“If you transfer skills, including management skills, to people who have not had the opportunity to obtain them, you leave a lasting legacy,” says Jeff, who has provided disaster-relief and humanitarian engineering solutions in Rwanda, Mauritania, East Timor, Eritrea, Eastern Europe, Nepal, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea and Aboriginal communities across Australia. “I’ve seen situations where engineers have installed sophisticated equipment but no-one thought to train the locals so ultimately it fell into disrepair.”

Kathryn Harries concurs. “The most satisfying thing about being a RedR volunteer is working with local

Engineers providing humanitarian and disaster relief are finding they have as much to learn from local people as they do from them. Humanitarian engineering is fast becoming an exercise in productive partnerships.

“People with a lot of money can have a huge impact and whether it’s a positive or negative experience depends on consultation. Working with the local community is crucial.”

Grandfather and child at Bakalot Pakistan after the earthquake. Photo courtesy of RedR.


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representatives, sharing their local and my technical knowledge to find the best solution for people in need,” she says.

Jeff believes the importance of engineers in developing and disaster regions can’t be underestimated. Doctors are sent to fix health problems. Engineers go to design ways to improve the quality of life and avoid the health problems in the first place.

“This was brought home to me when I provided engineers to work with Rwandan refugees,” says Jeff. “The situation was the equivalent of the population of Brisbane moving overnight to Albury. The infrastructure of the area was completely overwhelmed. The Rwandan crisis to me was depicted in a television picture of a small girl sitting beside a pool of black water and drinking from it with a tin can. If the cameraman had gone back the next day the small girl would likely have been dead. It portrayed to me the need for engineers in emergency situations providing clean water, sanitation and shelter, the very essentials for our survival. Engineers are needed for every aspect of any society, including refugees.”

Dr Rodney Care, RedR director, CEO and chairman of ARUP Australasia and adjunct professor at UNSW, says it is the project management skills of engineers that make them invaluable in problematic circumstances where one has to improvise

“The supply of food, water and sanitation doesn’t fit with the normal skills set of some engineers but engineers are practical and can do things pretty quickly and easily with guidance,” he says. “An acoustic engineer wanting to volunteer for RedR would not be greatly useful as an acoustician. But his skills to manage projects would be.”

Nonetheless, it requires special people and specific interpersonal skills to succeed in difficult circumstances. No RedR volunteer is sent into the field without appropriate training, particularly in cross-cultural differences and stress management.

Engineers without Borders, a group of young professionals involved in development projects, run socially responsible engineers programs through universities, and individuals involved in projects bone up on the language and culture before even booking an airline ticket.

“Good interpersonal skills are essential,” says Kathryn Harries. “You are working with others, who are very committed but with a different range of skills, abilities, backgrounds and countries of origin, in a highly charged, and often sleep-deprived environment, with limited equipment and time, and uncertainty as to the cultural needs of the affected community.”

Dr Philip Crisp, a senior lecturer at UNSW, is leader of the Safe Water Implementation Group (SWIG), a coalition of interdisciplinary scientists, engineers and social analysts concerned with the lack of safe drinking water in developing countries. He has worked for years in Bangladesh on solving the problem of arsenic in the water supply and is currently finishing a safe water book to be translated in the Bangla language and distributed to villagers. Dr Crisp firmly believes success lies in holistic and self-propagating solutions as well as respect for local cultures.

“Our approach is to solve water problems while addressing social, economic and technical factors in an integrated manner…solutions to safe water problems should be socially accepted and locally organised. Our projects are designed to use minimal capital and to work within village economies, without distorting the social structure by adding to the problems of graft and corruption that have often been associated with foreign aid.”

Dr Care says the most practical answer may not always be the right one because of cultural considerations. “In the tsunami, for example, it made sense to just move people to higher ground. But you have a lot of fisherman and with that comes a whole cultural structure. You have to work in ways that can lessen the impact of future disaster while still letting people live the way they want.”

In his book Shelter After Disaster, Ian Davis of Oxford’s Disaster Management Centre points out that following disasters around the world, local people using their own ingenuity and initiative have accomplished more than 80 percent of the reconstruction themselves, even in this age of rapid transport and communications. He believes the challenge to national and international agencies is to make a genuine contribution by doing something that strengthens and extends what the people are going to do anyway on their own.

The same principle applies in development work. Jeff Dobell recalls working in the Kowanyama Aboriginal community of North Queensland one year when contractors were brought in to renovate local housing. “They’re dirty buggers here,” a carpenter remarked to Jeff after finding a dead wallaby in a kitchen cupboard. Six months later when a grant came through to build a number of houses in the community, Jeff suggested that the Engineering Aid engineer arrange for the community to engage an architect with

Engineering to the rescue

“If you transfer skills, including management skills, to people who

have not had the opportunity to obtain them, you leave a lasting legacy.”

As an industry we are one of the last toproject ourselves as people who care.

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UNICEF School reconstruction, Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Photo courtesy of RedR.

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Engineering to the rescue

experience in Indigenous housing. The houses, subsequently built by members of the community, included a room in the undercroft area where wallabies could be cleaned, washed down and stored.

While low-tech responses often serve developing and disaster-struck communities best, high-tech engineering solutions certainly also play an important role.

If Australia had a rapid deployment system with remote sensing similar to China’s, for example, vital information on the recent Innisfail cyclone would have been to hand within a few hours, says Visiting Professor Bruce Forster of UNSW’s School of Surveying and Spatial Information and co-author of the new edition of Remote Sensing of Human Settlements, published by the US Society of Photogrammetry.

“For bushfires, floods and cyclones such a system would be invaluable,” says Professor Forster. “You could immediately link to GIS to rapidly assess damage and have information in hours instead of days. In Innisfail, data could have been digitally transmitted to a control centre and by late afternoon they would have known the damage.”

Another high-tech engineering solution is to have monitoring systems already in place, that can provide vital information if and when major ‘events’ occur. Dr Ian Turner and his research team at the Water Research Laboratory, a facility of UNSW’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, maintain a network of coastal imaging stations at a number of coastal erosion ‘hot spots’ located along the NSW and QLD coastline. He recently received Australian Academy of Science funding to develop a new field instrument with a UK collaborator. “When large coastal storms occur, coastal managers and engineers have immediate access to information that enables them to best manage their immediate resources. And after the storm, the recovery of the coast can also be effectively monitored and managed”.

Talk to any engineer who has worked in humanitarian relief and invariably they will report a sense of great privilege in having shared momentous times with people of different cultures. In the final year of her undergraduate degree at UNSW, PhD student Rebecca Barnes volunteered for development work in India with Engineering Ministries International. She was one of two engineers designing the water supply, distribution and disposal system for the Shanti Bhavan Hospital, the first permanent medical facility in an area of more than one million people. The work won her accolades from Engineers Australia, which named her

You have to work in ways that can lessen the impact of future disaster while still letting people live the way they want.”

The events of Beaconsfield were an extraordinary display of mining technology, people skills and mining engineering ingenuity. Professor Bruce Hebblewhite, Head of the School of Mining Engineering, reflects on the advances in mining that helped to make this rescue operation possible.“Many of the things they did in Beaconsfield would have required one-off engineering. A lot of the technology employed has been around for years but not necessarily in the way it was applied in this situation.

We saw various forms of drilling technologies, from well-targeted directionally controlled pilot bore holes, through to the large raise-bored holes which provided the eventual escape route. Raise-bored holes have been used in the mining industry for quite some time, but mainly for generating large diameter holes for ventilation and access, usually vertically, during routine mine development.

In mining technology, we saw the use of infrared cameras that could be put down bore holes as heat-sensing devices. We also saw a focus on the importance of mining communications systems. In the broader field of mining communications technologies, Australia really leads the world. Huge strides are being made in novel communication systems, with ultra-low frequency electromagnetic signals that use the rock as a transmission medium so that with large antennae on the surface or another appropriate location you can provide a communications network to all parts of a mine.

Underground mining, particularly metalliferous mining, is a three-dimensional operation – very complex, as seen in some

of the graphics and animations produced. Mine excavations exist as multiple openings in a range of different directions, on different vertical levels of the mine. These require a high-level surveying capability and complex computer modelling of the ore body and mining geometries. In this technology field, again, Australia leads the world with mining-related software products used for planning, design and operations reconciliation.

Blasting is the other area of technology that was at the forefront at Beaconsfield. Blasting has come a long way in the past couple of hundred years. There are a whole range of technologies that now exist to be able to vary the energy used in order to achieve the desired level of rock fragmentation, while minimising the impact of the blasts in terms of vibration. We also saw consideration of the much more recent developments in non-explosive fragmentation – using expanding grouts or gases to expand and fracture rock.

Mining engineering ingenuity was able to bring all these elements together to direct an appropriate rescue strategy while dealing with different rock types and mining environments.

The events were also a tremendous testimony to the ‘people’ aspects and skills within the mining industry. Apart from the amazing resilience of the two miners rescued, we saw demonstrated the camaraderie there is in the mining industry at all levels of a mining operation, and the ability of a team of people to work together to achieve a remarkable result – from the level-headed and focused mine management through to the determination and patient persistence of the rescue teams which in this country are made up of a mixture of normal mineworkers, engineers, or managers, who are all volunteers trained especially for a wide range of different rescue scenarios.”

Photo courtesy of Kathryn Harries.

Engineering AidContact: Jeff Dobell Tel: (02) 9449 4353Email: [email protected]

RedRTel: +61 2 6273 6544 Fax: +61 2 6273 6546 Email: [email protected]/australia

Engineers without BordersTel: 03-9696 9040Fax: 03-9696 9034Email: [email protected]

Engineering in EmergenciesArmed conflict, drought, famine and other serious disasters create emergencies in which large numbers of people require urgent help. Engineering in Emergencies is a practical handbook for all relief workers involved in giving humanitarian assistance at such times.

Engineering in Emergencies: A Practical Guide for Relief WorkersBy Jan Davis and Robert Lambert. ITDG Publishing in association with RedR. To obtain copies contact your local RedR office.

2004 Engineering Student of the Year. But for Rebecca, the personal reward was the experience itself.

“I’ll never forget my time with the Indian pastors, designing the hospital. One family gave up their beds to host 30 people for a week. I’ve never met a group of people so full of joy and generosity. It was an honour to work for them and I suspect I benefited more than they did.”

Says Kathryn Harries: “The most amazing thing about my experience was the opportunity to join both key national coordination meetings as well as work directly in the field – seeing it at both levels exposed what naturally works and what inherent challenges occur.”

Stuart Davies, director of programs with Engineers without Borders, believes the industry as a whole has much to benefit by becoming more active in humanitarian work. “As an industry we are one of the last to project ourselves as people who care,” he says. “In the legal profession, for example, the whole concept of pro bono is well established but we have been slower to respond. We have so much power in our hands to make a different world. In 20 years, Australia could lead the world in making a difference, in sustainability and in every other respect.”

One tangible way to achieve that goal, suggests Jeff Dobell, is to establish closer links between engineers and politicians. He advocates a model similar to that in the US where engineers are co-opted to work with various politicians so they can advise on the ramifications of decisions. This would involve engineers prior to any planning of infrastructure and how that should be established.

“The Prime Minister’s Science and Engineering Council partly fills that role but it’s very limited. Engineers should be more closely linked to the three levels of government.”

After all, he says, human beings can never be totally protected from disasters, natural or man made. What we can change is how we respond to them.

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The man credited with founding the Australian biomedical industry has been honoured in a fitting way. UNSW has established the Paul M Trainor Chair, a memorial Professorship in the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering.

The Chair was announced at a moving memorial service for the late industrialist, who passed away in January.

The service, held at UNSW, was attended by more than 200 people with speakers including Cochlear CEO, Dr Christopher Roberts (see Graduate Profile), Professor Graeme Clark, the inventor of the bionic ear and Matthew Trainor, Paul’s son.

Paul Trainor founded the Nucleus Group of companies which played such an important role in the development and commercialisation of firms such as Cochlear, Telectronics and Medtel and indirectly, Resmed and Ventracor.

“You only have to see the eyes of a child light up when they first hear sound with a Cochlear device to know that Paul truly made a difference,” says new head of the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, Professor Anne Simmons, who worked with the Nucleus Group for almost 20 years.

“Few groups have ever done as much to bring health and hope to others around the world. Paul’s contribution to this nation was immense.”

Initial funding of $1.5million for the Chair has come from UNSW commercialisation activities related to the CRC for Cardiac Technology of which Telectronics was the major industry partner. Further funds are

being sought to ensure longevity of the Chair.

“The University will place strong emphasis in the selection of an inaugural Paul M Trainor Professor to ensure that the incumbent combines outstanding academic qualifications with the experience and temperament to liaise closely with the biomedical engineering and research industry in exactly the way that Paul pioneered with universities and research institutions around the world,” says Professor Simmons.

“More than 50 students graduate from UNSW each year with a concurrent BE and Masters Degree in Biomedical Engineering. With the establishment of the Paul M Trainor Chair, this new generation of biomedical engineers will understand that there is an Australian biomedical industry because of this man’s energy, vision and determination.

“Paul Trainor was a great Australian who built a forward-thinking enterprise to create medical good, help people and to lead the way to a new industry in Australia and the University is excited.”

Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering

Honouring a visionary The UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science is participating in a €six million European Union research project to accelerate the use of membrane bioreactors for urban sewage treatment.

Membrane bioreactor (MBR) systems are considered state-of-the-art technology for treating municipal wastewater. MBRs treat the wastewater to a very high quality that surpasses the stringent EU requirements for discharge or water reuse. The technology is suited to either highly urbanised centres with ageing infrastructure as well as parts of the EU that require new infrastructure.

The Berlin Water Authority is the lead European agency on this project, titled “AMEDEUS” – Accelerated development of membrane bioreactors for urban sewage treatment. It is coordinating research and development activities in seven EU member countries.

The Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training funds the UNESCO Centre’s involvement in the project through an International Science Linkage grant.

The Australian node of the project is led by Greg Leslie, an Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering and Industrial Chemistry and the deputy director of the UNESCO Centre. The UNESCO Centre is coordinating input from Australian Universities, including the University of Technology, Sydney and major water uilities such as Sydney Water, the South Australian Water Corporation and United Utilities Australia.

The role of the Australian team is to develop a computer model for the design of large scale MBR plants. The innovative software will account for

School of Chemical Sciences and Engineering

Treating wastewater with top technology

both kinetic parameters as well as the complex hydraulic conditions that exist in MBRs.

By developing software to model residence time distributions in these reactors it will be possible to optimise the size of civil structures and mixing systems and identify which types of membranes promote uniform mixing and flow distribution.

To achieve this the centre will use computation fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques to construct a combined hydraulic-kinetic model for MBR design. The software will be developed and calibrated on recently installed MBR plants in Sydney (North Head), South Australia (Victor Harbor) as well as facilities in France and Belgium.

The outcome of the research will be a technique that will reduce the capital cost of MBR tankage and energy cost associated with mixing. This will allow communities to reduce the cost of producing high-quality reclaimed water that can be reused and recycled – an important factor for urban, rural and regional Australia.

Land development in Queensland has had a dramatic impact on the growth of a potentially toxic organism that threatens coastal waters, according to a team from the Centre for Water and Waste Treatment.

Centre director, Professor David Waite, ARC post-doctoral fellow Andrew Rose and PhD student Aurelie Godrant spent part of summer “cruising” on the Great Barrier Reef with colleagues from the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville.

The ARC Discovery-funded project in which they were involved is focussed on investigation of development on growth of the cyanobacterium Trichodesmium that grows in coastal waters and is critical to the nitrogen balance in these waters.

Of particular interest is the manner in which this organism acquires the key trace nutrient, iron, an element fundamental to both photosynthesis and to the ability of this organism to obtain nitrogen from the atmosphere.

It is now recognised that land management practices can modify the supply of iron to coastal waters and, in so doing, dramatically alter the ecology of these highly sensitive regions.

The project possesses an international flavour as Aurelie is undertaking her doctoral studies through a cotutelle programme at both

UNSW and the Universite de Bretagne Occidentale (UBO) in Brest on the west coat of France. Andrew is spending part of his time working with collaborators at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Field work on the Great Barrier Reef is being complemented by laboratory investigations at UNSW, at UBO and at WHOI of factors controlling iron supply to Trichodesmium and other organisms of interest such as the fish-killing organism, Chattonella.

New insights into how these organisms acquire vital nutrients will assist in understanding how changes to the environment influence their growth. This knowledge will, in turn, help develop better approaches to managing our coastal zone so that we neither induce unwanted blooms of dangerous organisms nor limit growth of those critical to a healthy environment.

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Managing our coastal zones

MBR systems surpass stringent requirements for wastewater.

Left to right: Andrew Rose, David Waite and Aurelie Godrant.

Paul Trainor will now have a Chair in his name.

�� UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 13/June 2006UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 13/June 2006 ��



A 22-year-old computer engineering student from the University of New South Wales has devised a simple iconic language that will help teach children the basics of programming.

Thomas Legowo is the brains behind fUNSoftWare, an iconic programming language which he plans to release as a free open source product.

Robolab, an iconic language which is widely used in schools and international competitions to program Lego robots, was the starting point for the project.

Thomas and his supervisor Eric Martin established a list of all the features that could be improved, and spent a few months coming up with a new design that would provide kids with an easier tool to learn programming.

“Thomas did a fantastic job,” says Eric Martin.” fUNSoftWare allows a first approach to programming that is fun, effective and rigorous,” he says. “Based on the reaction of potential users, it promises to become popular worldwide.”

Thomas believes it is the only graphic programming language to help children learn how to write correct programs and then lead them into standard text-based programming.

“You can use my program to learn Not Quite C, used to program Lego, and then C,” Thomas says. “You can use the icons to program originally. “Then you can look at the Not Quite C code automatically produced from your iconic program to see what is happening.

“Another important feature is that the program doesn’t allow its users to commit illegal steps along the way. This results in a program that is free of syntax errors. fUNSoftWare also has a layout manager that automatically comes up with a great layout of the program at all times. This efficiently teaches kids the importance of good layout, especially for debugging purposes.”

Professor Paul Compton, head of UNSW’s school of Computer Science and Engineering, believes fUNSoftWare will help teachers as well as students.

“Learning programming in school can be a big turn-off as it is very difficult to find programming tasks that are easy enough for school students to manage yet interesting and challenging,” he says. “Lego robots and fUNSoftWare are one way around this.”

The University of New South Wales this year hosted the national finals of Robocup Junior and will do so again in September 2006. The software is currently being trialled in a NSW high school.

School of Computer Science and Engineering

Putting the fun back in programmingPre-recorded CD lectures could see an end to the days of frantically scribbling notes in the classroom.

The School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications has successfully trialled CD lectures that feature an electronic whiteboard with the lecturer’s handwritten notes and a video of the lecturer explaining each point as it appears on the screen.

The novel teaching method was introduced to third-year undergraduate students in Signal Processing and Transform Methods and to postgraduate students in Speech and Audio Processing last year.

Associate Professor E. Ambikairajah, who developed the teaching tools and ran the trial and subsequent student survey, said 75 percent of students found the pre-recorded CDs provided a more efficient way of learning in comparison to live lectures.

“Ninety-six percent of the students liked the fact that they could review the CD-based lectures at their own pace to improve their understanding,”

“And eighty percent of the students felt they learnt more through the use of CD-based lectures.

The CD lectures are designed to be followed up with a face-to-face classroom discussion period in which any questions can be raised.

Seventy five percent of undergraduate students and 50 percent

School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications

Fast forward to virtual classrooms

of graduate students agreed that they had more opportunities to ask questions in classes having watched the pre-recorded lectures than in live lectures without the CD.

“Overall, students found the pre-recorded lectures to be very helpful towards their learning experience,” says A/Professor Ambikairajah.

“Lectures were considered worth attending , although students wanted class discussions (as opposed to lectures) to complement the use of the CD.

Students recommended the use of pre-recorded lectures for other courses within the school. There was no great difference between graduate and undergraduate students. Both groups have found the CD lectures equally helpful.”

More than 900 engineering students filled the Clancy Auditorium at the beginning of Session 1. They were the first class in a new Faculty-wide Design and Innovation course – a cornerstone of the new flexible first-year program introduced in 2006.

ENGG1000 Design and Innovation introduces the principles and methods of engineering design, with an emphasis on creativity and innovation, through hands-on activities and engineering projects. It also helps students gain skills in written expression, introduces the way a professional engineer works and helps students learn to use information resources effectively. And it provides a team-based environment in which students experience and learn about collaboration. This student-centred learning is valuable in itself and a fine platform for later studies.

“On that first Tuesday it was exciting to see so many of the new engineering students in one place. But even more exciting was the Impromptu Design activity, also for 900 students, that ran the following Thursday,” says course coordinator Robin Ford.

“Working in teams of eight, the whole class confronted a design task in the very first week of their studies. The task was to produce a device to deliver 50ml of water in an open plastic champagne glass from a height of 2.5m, using a kit of common items such as balloons, plastic bin-liner, paper, sticky tape and string.

In just two hours, each team worked through the classical stages of design, identifying the problem, creating ideas, selecting a design, building their inventions and seeing them tested on the Physics Lawn. It was a carnival day that showcased the creativity, teamwork and skills of our first-year students for 2006.

“Not everything in ENGG1000 will happen in such a large class. To provide diversity, students will do most of their work in classes run by nine of the Schools of the Faculty,” says Robin.

“In each class the work will be project-based, centred on a task relevant to that particular engineering stream. There are 13 projects that range from a solar-powered device to climb a vertical rope, a sustainable dwelling, and computer code to optimise the movements of trains on a model train-set. Despite their variety they all share the essential features of the design process.”

School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering

Designing a fresh approach to engineering

School students have taken to fUNSoftWare.

A screen grab from the electronic whiteboard.

Design challenges are now part of first year.




New software that will model particle flow in block caves and sub-level caving is being developed by a former alumnus of UNSW, now a senior lecturer in the School of Mining Engineering.

Dr Glenn Sharrock, a former Coop scholar, has joined the school after years in industry to develop Cave-Sim™, a new particle flow code to help analyse the performance of different cave layout operations.

“Block caves and sub-level caving mines are now operating at more extreme depths and in stronger rocks than ever before,” says Dr Sharrock.

“The rules of thumb and tools for design and layout of these mines were not developed for these environments, and the resulting cave designs are often in conflict with the operational and geotechnical requirements for large caving operations in moderately to highly stressed environments.”

The Cave-Sim™ modelling package enables full integration of economic parameters and geological models into a three-dimensional flow model of an operating cave.

The change in technology has been made possible by the use of the Cellular-Automata (CA) mathematical technique, instead of the traditional Discrete Element Method (DEM) or Finite Element Method (FEM).

Cave-Sim™ builds on the principles of CA while newly introducing particle friction, particle size distributions and stress into three-dimensional cellular automata.

“I’m playing around with coupling this software with FEM and DEM so you can model rock breakage and flow in a full working model of the actual mining operation,” says Dr Sharrock.

“The advantage of Cave-Sim™ over other techniques is its ability to efficiently simulate the dynamics of large numbers of particles, for long simulation times, in a matter of hours.

“Apart from advantages of simulation size, complexity and duration, the method is readily calibrated against observed site or problem-specific behaviours, which are represented as fundamental rules in the simulations.

“The development of these rules and further application of Cave-Sim™ are presently underway.”

Dr Sharrock has established the UNSW Advances Numerical Modelling in Mining Geomechanics group which is comprised of academics and industry members with an interest in this area. It is expected to spearhead a dynamic new direction for research within the School of Mining Engineering.

School of Mining Engineering

Simulating flow with greater accuracy It’s estimated that 7 billion tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions come from human activity – the main contributor to greenhouse effect on global climate change.

Australia’s coal-fired power stations produce about 70 percent of the nation’s total installed electricity generation capacity and emit about 190 million tonnes of CO2/year.

One proposed method for reducing how much of the greenhouse gas ends up in the atmosphere is to store CO2 in geological formations. There are currently three options for geological disposal of CO2: depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams, and saline formations.

In the design of an underground CO2 disposal site, one must assess the capacity and ability of the proposed geological formation for the injection and storage of CO2. Typical concerns that arise in a CO2 disposal project are whether the proposed geological structure has favourable properties that allow the injection of the proposed volume of CO2 for a certain period and whether the injected CO2 will stay in there without any leakage. Answers to such questions can be sought by means of numerical simulation of simultaneous flow of CO2 with the existing fluids in deep geological formations.

A part of the collaborative research at the School of Petroleum Engineering

School of Petroleum Engineering

Simulating Underground Disposal of CO2

with the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) aims to focus on numerical simulation of CO2 disposal in potential Australian sites.

Simulations are run for short-term and long-term movement of CO2 in underground structures. The short-term simulations analyze the injectivity of CO2 into the potential formation, the migration of CO2 towards the trapping structure which is governed by viscous, gravity and capillary forces, and also some technical issues such as how many injection wells and well spacing.

The long-term simulations investigate the post-injection movement and stability of CO2 plume created in the formation and effects of different mechanisms on entrapment of CO2, such as capillarity, dissolution of CO2 in local fluids, and chemical interaction with rock matrix.

Day one of Suntech Power’s float on the New York Stock Exchange and the excitement is palpable. By day’s end, the share price has risen 41 percent, raising US$396 million for the fledgling Chinese player in the booming solar industry.

This is good news for the ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Silicon Photovoltaics and Photonics. It is closely associated with the Wuxi-based operator, one of the world’s most successful and fastest-growing photovoltaics companies.

Suntech and UNSW are about to launch a new solar cell technology that will overcome a fundamental weakness of cells that have been on the market for the past 20 years. Much light is wasted from the top surface of most commercial solar cells because of their grid formation.

“The new technology provides a way to eliminate the dead layer through the use of semiconductor fingers which make good contact to the metal grid and carry the generated current to where the metal is located,” says award-winning researcher Professor Stuart Wenham, a Scientia professor who consults at Suntech.

The Centre’s international reputation grows stronger all the time. In February, two high-profile leaders took time out from their tight schedules during the Climate Change conference to learn more about UNSW’s work.

Chinese Secretary General of the State Council Hua Jianmin and

US Secretary for Energy Samuel W. Bodman made separate visits to meet senior UNSW staff and explore the photovoltaics laboratories.

The centre’s growing reputation in China also prompted visits from a World Bank Global Environment Fund delegation who are working on a China Renewable Energy Development Project and a separate delegation from Shaanxi Province.

Head of the School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering, Dr Richard Corkish, also met up with Science and Technology Minister Xu Guanhua, during his stay in Sydney.

“We’re delighted that leaders of the two of the world’s most powerful nations recognise the leading position of the Centre – and the role that solar energy is playing in the world today,” says Dr Corkish.

“The solar energy market is booming in places like Germany and Japan and China is about to become a powerhouse for the production and use of solar cells – due in part to UNSW technology.”

School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering

China’s star lights way for solar

Cave-Sim software models particle flow.

Tracking carbon output.

Hua Jianmin (left) on a visit to the Photovoltaics lab.




Namuru: the first open-source reconfigurable GPS receiver.

The Australian biomedical industry is unusual on a few counts. It is blessed with the ability to manufacture in Australia yet compete admirably on the world stage. And it boasts a tight-knit group of professionals, many of whom trace their connections back to UNSW.

The career of Dr Christopher Roberts,

Cochlear’s chief executive officer, is a case in point. Chris completed an undergraduate degree in Chemical

Engineering in 1975. It so happened that Professor Peter Farrell, the founding director of the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, was then lecturing in Chemical Engineering on artificial kidneys.

Chris wrote his final-year thesis on artificial kidneys. Rather than finding work as a chemical engineer, he opted for a position with Domedica, a company importing artificial kidneys and part of the Nucleus Group of companies established by industrialist Paul Trainor, the so-called “father” of the biomedical industry.

“The concept that you could keep someone alive using fundamental chemical engineering principles was just so exciting to me,” says Chris, who soon found that he thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the biomedical industry.

Having completed an MBA to boost his business skills, Chris returned to study at UNSW, this time doing a PhD with Professor Farrell and his successor Professor Klaus Schindhelm.

Armed and ready, Chris took off in 1984 to the US to run another Paul Trainor company, BGS Medical, which offered implantable electrical devices to stimulate bone growth.

He stayed in the US until 1989. He had a brief stint with the Nucleus Group back in Sydney, before spending time with Telectronics company in Paris (By that stage Paul Trainor had sold his Nucleus Group and Telectronics companies to Pacific Dunlop – and Dr Colin Sutton another UNSW alumnus was running Telectronics in Europe).

He left in 1992 to join Peter Farrell at ResMed, which provides breathing apparatus for sleep disorders. Chris had been one of the founding directors but had never worked fulltime in the company until then.

Graduate profile >Dr Chris Roberts

My connections go way back. My wife has two degrees from UNSW and my daughter is completing her final year there.

He had come full circle, working with the man who inspired his career and through whom he met so many other alumni also associated with the inspiring Paul Trainor.

“I’ve certainly had a close association with UNSW throughout my career – as has Professor Anne Simmons [now head of the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering] who worked at Domedica.

“My connections go way back. My wife has two degrees from UNSW (BA LLB) – she was known as Maxine Wills then. And my daughter Charmaine is completing her final year Commerce/Law degree there.”

At Cochlear, which Chris joined in 2004, he has turned the business around. “The business fundamentals are great,” he says. “There is a large unmet clinical need, the technology works brilliantly and Cochlear is the undisputed global leader in the cochlear implant field.” In addition there are many opportunities to add other implantable devices for the hearing impaired.

Between work, his wife and four daughters and travelling up to 40 percent of the year, there is little time for leisurely pursuits. Not that Chris minds. He feels there is much more work to be done in creating greater awareness of the marvels of implantable devices, and specifically of the opportunity to provide hearing to tens of thousands of new patients each year.

“And it’s exciting dealing with the leaders in the field globally,” he says. Not bad for a lad from UNSW.

Where in the world?

Eva Hanly Graduated: BE (Hons)/ BA (International Relations), 2001.

Career Highlights: While I was still studying engineering, I worked at Thiess Pty Ltd part-time and during my holidays. I joined Thiess when I graduated and was promptly relocated from a comfortable office in Sydney to an underground coal mine. This was something I thought may be challenging but definitely not where I had seen myself working! However, after I settled in, I found it to be one of my most memorable times in my career to date and I met some wonderful people. The camaraderie and teamwork when everyone is living away from home is extraordinary and I got my “site experience” which is something I recommend to all engineers, even those like me who are more interested in business operations and management. I have also worked on major projects in civil engineering, telecommunications and building, with Thiess and later Multiplex.

Current Role: I am currently the National Operations and Systems Manager at Bilfinger Berger Services (BBS), the services arm of the Bilfinger Berger group of companies.

Interests: I maintain a strong interest in supporting the engineering profession. I was the former Chair of Young Engineers Sydney and am currently a Director on the Centre for Engineering Leadership and Management’s national board. I am also a Director on the board of Engineers Without Borders.

Photo courtesy of Eva Hanly.

A team from the School of Surveying and Spatial Information has developed the first open-source reconfigurable GPS receiver.

Based on Altera’s Cyclone FPGA, the Namuru receiver allows for more flexible design. Users can download the UNSW design and build their own GPS system for specialist use. Alternatively, they can purchase the UNSW system and adapt it accordingly.

“We believe it will be a very good platform for research development and specialist applications,” says Associate Professor Andrew Dempster.

“You can change the nature of the digital circuitry, making it easier to design your own specialised GPS receiver. One UK company is interested in using it for automotive design,” he says.

“We believe the Namuru will also be of great interest to hobbyists. People want to position all sorts of things from pets to model aircraft.”

Namura means “to see the path” in the language of the Eora people,

indigenous to the Sydney region. It can also mean Navigational Apparatus Made at UNSW for Reconfigurable Use.

Peter Mumford, who spent a year designing the receiver, said the team took the two digital elements of a GPS receiver – the baseband chip and the processor, and ported them into the FPGA.

Because of its reconfigurable nature, the Namuru can easily be adapted to suit both standard GPS and Galileo systems. The board can also be readily adapted to accept the new signals from GPS.

Downloads and further information are available from www.dynamics.co.nz/gpsreceiver

School of Surveying & Spatial Information Systems

Open source GPS receiver makes design flexible

Photos courtesy of Dr Roberts and Cochlear.com.

�0 UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 13/June 2006

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