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Infographic: How do you build a hydrogen refuelling station?

CSIRO’s research into hydrogen as a fuel source for passenger vehicles has been given a boost by the installation of a refuelling station in Melbourne.

This hydrogen refuelling station is fully self-contained

The CSIRO-driven project, supported by the Victorian Hydrogen Hub led by the Swinburne University of Technology, brings Australia one step closer to integrating hydrogen-powered transport.

“Green hydrogen will play a crucial role in the energy transition and decarbonisation of the road transport industry,” said Deepak Mistry, Principal Applications Engineer – Hydrogen at Pacific Energy, which was responsible for designing and installing the facility.

“Transport is the third largest contributor to emissions in Australia. As per Australia’s National Hydrogen Strategy 2024, it is believed that green hydrogen can reduce emissions by up to 186 million t of carbon dioxide per year by 2050.”

The initiative is now a finalist in the Engineers Australia Excellence Awards, in the Project of the Year category, having won the award at a state level in Victoria. createdigital.org.au/hydrogen-refuelling-station-

Move over mice, meet the new leader in scent detection

An electronic nose developed by Western Sydney University researchers is capable of identifying odours within milliseconds, in an article originally published by The Conversation.

This compact electronic nose is capable of identifying odours within milliseconds.

Imagine a robot that can detect scents in the air and track down their sources as efficiently as a dog or a mouse. If realised, it could detect small wildfires in dense forests, find people buried in debris after an earthquake, or even hunt for truffles!

Our research team has brought this vision one step closer to reality, by creating a compact electronic nose capable of identifying odours within milliseconds.

In our study, the goal was to explore this artificial sense of smell, and test how fast we can extract valuable information about the environment from the air. We show that the “speed of smell” matches and sometimes even exceeds those of mammals.

Our study is now published in Science Advances.

Obstacles remain for migrant engineers in Australia

Overseas-trained engineers are vital for the country, but it’s not always a smooth journey. What’s being done to break down barriers and make the most of their skills?

While not all overseas-qualified engineers struggle to find engineering positions, many do – despite the fact the existing workforce consists of more migrant engineers than local engineers.

Almost three in five engineers working in Australia were born overseas, according to Engineers Australia’s research report Barriers to employment for migrant engineers.

“Australia is highly reliant on migrant engineers,” Michael Bell AffillEAust, Head of Policy at Engineers Australia, told create. “We have a lot of challenges developing engineers locally. Engineering university commencements have been declining since about 2018.

“While we’re working as a country to improve that, it’s going to take time.”

Engineers Australia recently attended COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, reinforcing engineering’s vital role in a climate-smart future. Here are the reflections of Simon Koger, Climate Change Manager at Engineers Australia.

With conversations around government finance, political change and private-sector investment, what is being touted as the “finance COP” is off to a blistering start. With an estimated 30,000 participants, the annual UN Climate Change Council provides a platform for stakeholders across government, industry and global society to address and strategise on ways to collaboratively address climate change.

As an official observer organisation, Engineers Australia represented the interests of engineers as the leaders in climate action. For Engineers Australia, maintaining a presence at COP is critical. Our involvement directly supports our climate change position statement, and provides an opportunity to affirm our credibility and influence on climate-related issues. Attending places us in a position to influence and engage in critical dialogues, helping to align our goals with both national and global climate agendas.

Engineers Australia has attended the last three COPs. This aligns with our Climate Smart Engineering initiative (CSEI) and is central to our efforts to build valuable connections, develop insights and expand the practice of engineering toward climate resilience. createdigital.org.au/climate-smart-future-cop29

Energy efficient building solutions – supporting Australia’s decarbonisation by curbing energy consumption – With mandatory climate-related disclosure laws already in force, businesses are under pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings.

MetecnoPIR, a division of the Bondor Metecno Group, offers premium thermal building solutions that can help the commercial and industrial sector to reduce energy demand.

As companies across the country prepare to disclose and reduce their carbon footprints, energy efficient building solutions like those offered by MetecnoPIR will play a vital role in ensuring compliance with regulations while driving down energy costs – createdigital.org.au/supporting-australias-decarbonisation-consumption

In what is one of the most significant reforms to corporate reporting in Australian history, the country’s new climate disclosure regime comes into effect on 1 January 2025. Under the changes, large corporations with a revenue of more than $500 million will be required to report on Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. These include direct emissions from business activities and the energy used to power those operations.

By 2027, the reporting obligation expands to include businesses with revenues of $50 million or more, in addition to an enlargement of mandatory reporting including Scope 3 emissions.

Improving the quality of climate-related disclosures provides greater transparency to manage climate-related financial risks, identify opportunities and examine emissions reduction plans, targets and strategies. A rigorous, internationally aligned climate disclosure regime supports greater international capital flows required for the transition to net zero, bringing Australia in line with other jurisdictions, including the EU, UK, New Zealand and Japan.

There are many paths to decarbonisation. MetecnoPIR has identified opportunities for large-scale commercial clients to reduce energy consumption by retrofitting existing buildings with its innovative insulated roofing and walling solutions, such as MetecnoPanel.

Trouble in paradise for Queensland dam

Why can’t Paradise Dam be repaired? – The Paradise Dam rebuild has led to several key recommendations for bolstering dam safety management.

This article was originally published in the November 2024 issue of create with the headline “Trouble in paradise”.

In stark contrast to its name, Paradise Dam has had a fraught development. The 300 GL-capacity roller compacted concrete (RCC) gravity dam, the largest by volume in Australia, experienced severe structural damage from flooding that threatened its integrity. It was subsequently announced that the dam couldn’t be fixed and a new wall would be built immediately downstream. So why did this happen – and how has it influenced the management of dam safety in Australia?

Structural questions

After the Burnett Dam Alliance completed construction in 2005, Paradise Dam experienced a series of flooding events, including in December 2010-January 2011 – the most serious Queensland flooding event since 1974 – and in January 2013.

The 2010-11 flooding caused spillway flows for the first time in the dam’s history. The 315 m-long primary spillway has an ogee crest shape, while the 485 m-long secondary spillway is a trapezoidal crest section. In the months following, it was identified that considerable damage had been caused to the primary spillway, training walls on the left and right, the fishway and other areas of the dam. Erosion was also evident along the banks.

Flooding in 2013, when the primary spillway crest overtopped by 8.65 m, caused the riverbed further down the Burnett River to experience severe scouring, which developed along a fault zone in the rock. Despite the flooding being “well within” the dam’s limits, according to the Paradise Dam Commission of Inquiry, there was damage to roughly half of the top layer of RCC in the apron slab. Sections of the apron’s sill had been dislodged and washed downstream.

Follow the link above for further details.

The global economy is only 7.2 per cent circular

Construction, manufacturing, transport and the food industry put the greatest pressure on the planetary boundaries. Here’s how countries can reform their thinking to achieve maximum circularity.

What goes around comes around – except in key industries that use far more than they reuse or reinvest into the cycle of production. More than 500 trillion t of materials have been consumed in the past six years – almost as much as the entire 20th century. This continues to rise. The built environment, manufactured goods, transport and the global food system are among the industries contributing the most to this imbalance.

The Circularity Gap Report 2024, an initiative of Circle Economy, outlines the poor performance across multiple metrics and countries. It says that of the nine “planetary boundaries” that measure the environment’s health, six have been broken due to the “take-make-waste” economy.

How NASA uses generative design to triple component strength

Advances in generative design and AI are changing the way NASA creates some of its most complex machines.

While traditional computational design starts with a predefined shape or idea that is then refined and optimised, generative design begins without a concept, and uses the specific objectives and constraints set by the engineer to create a design.

In other words, generative design allows engineers to focus on defining what a design needs to do, and AI can then produce concepts that comply with their requirements.

NASA, a pioneer in the field, calls it their “evolved structures process”, and to date it has demonstrated a reduction in development time and cost of more than ten-fold, while structural performance has been enhanced three-fold.

Ryan McClelland, a research engineer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, told create that the “text-to-spaceship” vision is a bold way of thinking about what the agency can develop with AI-powered generative design.

“At Goddard, we start with the science need, such as imaging exoplanets, and then that gets broken down into requirements, such as a certain size of mirror or kind of orbit,” he said. “That is then broken down into the requirements of the systems, such as what is needed from a detector.”

It’s called requirements decomposition, and NASA uses generative AI to help “radically speed up” that process.