DMTC congratulates Defence scientist, Ms Zenka Mathys, PSM, who has won the 2017 Minister’s Award for Achievement in Defence Science for improving fire safety for Navy ships, submarines and crew.
Ms Mathys is also a member of the DMTC Project 9.14 team, looking to advance blast and shock testing methodologies.
Minister for Defence, Senator the Hon Marise Payne, congratulated Ms Mathys (from Defence Science and Technology’s Maritime Division) for her outstanding scientific achievement in developing fire protection systems which have contributed significantly to the survivability of Navy platforms.
“Ms Mathys is a very deserving winner of this important defence science award,” Minister Payne said.
The annual Minister’s Award for Achievement in Defence Science recognises original and outstanding contributions capable of enhancing Australia’s defence effectiveness and efficiency.
Pictured (l-r) Minister for Defence, Senator the Hon Marise Payne, Ms Zenka Mathys, Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, AC. Image courtesy of the Department of Defence
DMTC has held another successful Student Conference, with scholarship recipients gathering in Melbourne on 2 November.
Our annual student conference is conducted in partnership with the Research Training Centre for Naval Design and Manufacturing (RTCNDM) and the Defence Science Institute. The focus of the conference is to give PhD and Masters candidates the opportunity to professionally present on the progress and conclusions of their research work to their peers and to continue to develop their presentation and communication skills. This year’s conference topics were wide-ranging, with everything from inspection robotics to immunology to additive manufacturing of cutting tools, and more.
More information about the 2017 Conference including presentation abstracts is available here.
Some of the presenters from this year’s Conference (l-r) Panneer Ponnusamy (Swinburne), Rowan Pivetta (Flinders) and Emily Kibble (UWA Murdoch).
DMTC team members participated in DST Group’s Partnerships Week for 2017. The event provided opportunities for DST Group partners and industry to understand the best ways to engage with DST Group in the rollout of new policy and program initiatives, particularly the Next Generation Technologies Fund.
Our Supply Chain Engagement manager, Charlotte Morris, was interviewed as part of the post-event video compile.
“Walk before you run” – A better approach to program design
An enhanced approach to program development in DMTC is resulting in smarter engagement with prospective industry and research partners, faster transition from development to implementation and more strategic deployment of resources. The more rigorous approach, outlined at DMTC’s annual conference in March, was successfully implemented in a project recently completed within DMTC’s Maritime Program. Research partner Swinburne University joined forces with Adelaide-based industry partner AirSpeed to conduct a scoping review on the effect of impact resistance on the durability of composite structures in the marine environment. The project team scrutinised existing academic literature along with existing technical solutions, and went on to benchmark current Australian industry capability and identify prospective industry and research partners that could be involved in follow-on projects. DMTC’s Maritime Program Leader, Associate Professor Stephen van Duin, is upbeat about the results. “Defence projects are often described as a long game, but it’s also true that the early phases of a program or project are often the most critical to long-term success,” he said. “In this case, we’ve spent five or six months making sure we have a really good understanding of the technical risks and opportunities, which will help us as we move forward.”
Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC) Annual Conference
As DMTC’s Lead Program Manager Deepak Ganga explains, scoping and de-risking activities, like this one with Swinburne and AirSpeed, are all about helping the DMTC Management Team and Board to make better decisions. “There will be times when these early investigations lead us to decide not to pursue new projects. That’s actually a successful outcome in terms of avoiding wasted effort or mis-directed investments,” Deepak says. “Particularly in areas where the technical risk is higher, we can use a relatively quick project task to better understand the technical issues and to prove our assumption before making a more significant investment. “In this case it’s about answering questions like ‘What is the current state of the development of marine composites? What technical improvements can be made and what are the risks involved with moving along the TRL path? What would a new project, or suite of projects, look like?’.” “All of this knowledge helps us to make higher-confidence estimates about development of the technology and about hitting the milestones we set for capability, cost and time.”
