News Archive — 2007

October 2007 — Clever design cleans up for UNSW

A toxic pond, a dangerous leak, a hazardous rescue mission. This was the challenge faced and overcome by a talented team of UNSW Mechanical Engineering students who won this year's Warman Design and Build Competition.

Second-year students Nathan Symonds, Afroz Awan, Jay Davey and Matt Webb topped a field of 17 teams from around Australia and New Zealand with their machine designed to respond to a hypothetical environmental contamination threat on a mythical planet named Gondwana.

Warman Competition teams were required to act as rescue teams from Earth: designing a machine which could be deployed in the event of a leak from a pond of a valuable but highly toxic chemical. The machine needed to be able to place devices to stop the "leak" and also recover a number of expensive "sensor units".

In reality the teams were required to create an autonomous machine, within stringent weight, power and size limits, which could traverse an obstacle-laden 3.6m course, climb over barriers, deposit two balls into holes (or "leaks") and pick up a number of others on a single run.

Seven months of brainstorming, designing and painstaking testing by the UNSW team went into creating a wheeled machine capable of fulfilling the tasks and at the final, held at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum on September 23, they emerged victorious amid tough competition from the University of Western Australia and RMIT.

Afroz said the greatest challenge of entering the competition was conceiving a design that would work.

"It was definitely the designing aspect of it that was most difficult because we are going from nothing", she said.

The team shared a $1,000 prize for their win.

Photo: (l to r) Nathan Symonds, Afroz Awan and Jay Davey after their win.

June 2007 — Funding success for water treatment research

Dr Gary Rosengarten from the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, and Associate Professor Greg Leslie, School of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, are part of the UNSW team that has been awarded nearly $1 million by the federal government to develop and evaluate energy efficient membranes. The research could spawn new generation technologies for water desalination and water recycling. UNSW will partner with eight other Australian universities and the CSIRO, to form the Advanced Membrane Technologies for Water Treatment Research Cluster.

Bringing together leading scientists from a range of disciplines, the Cluster aims to address one of the biggest challenges facing Australia, the delivery of sustainable water supplies.

The UNSW team received $933,000 over three years, the largest funding allocation awarded to any of the partnering institutions. $3.99 million was awarded in total.

Dr Rosengarten is currently researching the properties of two diatom species using scanning electron and atomic force microscopy. Diatoms are the commonest micro-algae in the world. The tiny photosynthesising creatures live in salty and freshwater environments and form a valuable part of the food chain for small grazing animals.

His findings reveal that both species possess tiny pores smaller than one millionth of a metre in diameter that might be applicable in waste water recycling, saltwater desalination and preventive health care. These pores are so fine that they could filter out viruses and bacteria yet still absorb the nutrients that they require to supply their energy needs.

Other partners in the Cluster are: Monash University, Victoria University, The University of Melbourne, RMIT, Curtin University of Technology, the University of Queensland, Deakin University and Murdoch University.