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Diabetes hope P7
Solar energy powers on P12
Issue 6 | June 2009
Post
modern
Designer stamps her
cultural identity

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Contents
Issue 6 | June 2009
Diabetes hope P7
Solar energy powers on P12
Post
ISSUE 6 | JUNE 2009
modern
Designer stamps her
cultural identity
06
10
swinburne JUne 2009
Swin_0906_p01-24.indd 1 15/05/09 3:33 PM
Upfront
2
Collaboration is the currency
in our knowledge-based economy
Australia’s economic prosperity rests on the important contributions
made by Australian universities – a point highlighted in recent reviews
of the Australian Innovation System and higher education. Without
creating knowledge and developing innovative minds we will not thrive
in the 21st century.
Swinburne University of Technology is a hands-on partner in striving
for answers to future challenges, by making our graduates knowledgeready
and flexible and by creating new knowledge. Our ability to
generate and accumulate wisdom through groundbreaking and relevant
research is vital. Furthermore, Swinburne’s strategic focus has ensured
that this research is recognised as genuinely world-class.
As a dual-sector (TAFE to PhD) institution we are central to the
‘knowledge economy’. Through TAFE we develop the next generation
of competency-skilled workers, able to adapt to the rapidly changing
demands of the modern workplace. Our Higher Education degree
students develop their expertise and knowledge in a research-intensive
environment. Learning from active, world-class researchers enables our
students to further develop their capacity for independent thought and
innovation. ‘Question Everything’ is heartfelt at Swinburne and built into
every undergraduate’s program and consequent outcomes.
Of course, new knowledge is of little value unless it is shared and
put to work.
Swinburne is the acknowledged home of industry-based learning
and this connection to industry flows though to our research and
researchers. For example, Swinburne’s participation in the Cooperative
Research Centres (CRC) program – a government-sponsored scheme
that links industry with research providers – is more than double that
usually expected for an institution of its size.
We understand that development of knowledge in the 21st century
relies on genuine effective partnerships between universities and those
in the position to put that information to best use.
Effective partnerships and collaborations are apparent in many of the
articles in this issue of Swinburne magazine. I hope in reading about some
of the exciting research and achievements you too can start thinking about
how we can work together to lift Australia’s economic and social capacities.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research)
Professor Andrew Flitman
cover story
18 Dani’s journey
across big art on a
small canvas
Born in China and raised
in Hong Kong, Dani Poon
travelled nervously to
Melbourne as a 17-year-old
to stamp Australian art into
her destined way
Features
Kellie Penfold
03 cloud riders to be the
envy of web surfers
Richard Constantine
04 from the minds
of babes a key to
understanding ... us
Australia’s first cognitive
neuroscience ‘baby laboratory’
is hoping to learn how infantile
thoughts and gestures mature
into deliberate action; how the
human brain develops and
sometimes fails
rebecca thyer
06 Diabetes hope on the
wings of silver cicadas
The wings of a familiar noisy
insect, the cicada, were the
starting point for a device that will
be able to continuously monitor
blood glucose levels
Penny Fannin
09 Alloy research cuts
through the fighter
cost barrier
rebecca thyer
10 All power to the sun
and the light team
Affordable solar power may soon
be just a flick of the switch away
robin taylor
12 Companies find a
competitive green edge
A business environmental
mentoring program is showing
that ‘going green’ can win
customers and profits
robin taylor
14 No joke when it’s
survival of the funniest
Bianca Nogrady & Rebecca Thyer
15 New environment to
debug global-scale IT
upgrades david adams
16 Dark mysteries lure
cosmic surveyors
A massive survey of the universe
is under way in Australia to detect
the faintest of echoes: an acoustic
‘wiggle’ from the Big Bang. A
wiggle that may hold the key to
understanding a mysterious new
force – dark energy – that is
causing the universe to fly apart
Gio Braidotti
20 Digital dust-off for
history’s watchhouses
Julian Cribb
21 Will the ferryman come
for climate refugees?
robin taylor
22 A modern-day oracle
on the ocean waves
Like gypsies read tea leaves to
foresee the future, researchers
can read something of our future
in the winds and waves. However,
this modern soothsaying relies on
masses of information – data that
Swinburne is collating to build the
world’s first complete picture of
ocean wave activity
Julian Cribb
•• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• ••
12
16
Published by Swinburne University of Technology
Editor: Dorothy Albrecht, Director, Marketing Services
Deputy editor: Julianne Camerotto, Communications Manager
(Research and Industry), Marketing Services
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne
Written, edited, designed and produced on behalf of Swinburne University
of Technology by Coretext, www.coretext.com.au, 03 9670 1168
Enquiries: 1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
Website: www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
Email: magazine@swinburne.edu.au
Cover photo: Dani Poon photographed by Paul Jones
Swinburne University of Technology collects and uses your information in accordance with our
Privacy Statement, which can be found at: www.swinburne.edu.au/privacy.
If you do not wish to receive communications from us, you can email privacyoptout@swinburne.edu.au,
fax (03) 9214 8447, or write to Swinburne University of Technology, Privacy at Swinburne,
PO Box 218, Hawthorn VIC 3122.
The information contained in this publication was correct at the time of going to press, June 2009.
CRICOS provider Code 00111D
ISSN 1835-6516 (Print)
ISSN 1835-6524 (Online)

June 2009 swinburne
Cloud riders
to be the envy of web surfers
essay by Richard Constantine*
A quick scan of the daily newspaper shows
just how much data-driven information
is being produced these days and how
everyone, from decision-makers in business
and government to scientists and researchers,
is drawing on ever-increasing volumes of
data to try to solve problems.
However, good decision-making requires
more than just great volumes of data, no matter
how accurate and up-to-date it is. Data has to
be carefully mined for the right information,
for the gold to be sifted from the gravel.
Nowhere is data volume more a quality
assurance (QA) issue than at universities,
where researchers, by the very nature of their
job, are confronted with vast quantities of
data from electronic sensors, all manner of
measuring tools, analytical equipment and
myriad other information streams.
The data that is stored and processed then
forms part of a network of ‘information banks’,
increasingly accessible to researchers and other
users via the internet. While proximity to an
information bank is no longer an issue, the
ability to access and process information from
any location is still a problem.
The new era that is emerging is ‘cloud
computing’, which allows people to access
software applications and their own files
using any internet-connected computer,
anywhere, at any time.
An analogy is the provision of essential
services such as electricity, water and gas. The
generation and distribution of these services
occurs off-site and the consumer simply needs
to ‘plug in’ to the services concerned to have
them delivered down the line.
All of the major IT organisations, such
as IBM, Cisco Systems, Dell, Symantec,
Sun Microsystems, HP and Facebook, as
well as many small organisations, have
already developed their own dedicated
cloud computing divisions to organise the
development, marketing and sales of hardware,
software and services in this burgeoning area.
Microsoft, Google and others have developed
a range of web-based applications and,
importantly, web-based storage.
At universities like Swinburne University
of Technology, students and staff are now
expecting a more flexible and dynamic
IT environment that will cater for them
in moving between campuses, including
photo: paul Jones
offshore campuses, and other locations.
Telecommuting, for part of the week at
least, is now a more viable option for many
university staff. Applications such as learning
management systems, student administration
systems, human resources and finance
systems, to name a few, need to be available
anywhere at anytime. Cloud computing or
delivery via the internet is shaping as the
answer to this increasing need for mobility.
A number of the basic requirements for
effective cloud computing are already in
place, such as sufficient bandwidth with
reliable, high-speed connectivity and a range
of software applications already available via
the web.
According to the Australian Bureau
of Statistics, 67 per cent of Australian
households have home internet access and,
of these, more than 43 per cent are highspeed
broadband users. It is likely that the
Australian online experience would be
similar to that in America, where research
undertaken through the Pew Research
Center’s ‘Internet & American Life’ project
has shown that 69 per cent of Americans
online now use cloud computing activities.
While the fog is starting to lift to reveal
the true form of the cloud, there are still
blurred patches. The most critical element
that is yet to be resolved relates to the remote
storage of corporate data. It raises obvious
questions about security, privacy, intellectual
property and reliability of access.
Who has jurisdiction over data stored
in remote locations? Do we know what is
happening behind the service boundary?
Who is in control? What processes are in
place to guarantee access to critical data or
files as and when needed? It behoves us all
to ensure that governance arrangements and
contract terms relating to service delivery,
including how the services are accessed, are
fully researched and resolved.
A recent detailed study of cloud computing
by the University of California, Berkeley, has
worked through these issues and identified a
number of potential solutions, such as having
multiple cloud-computing providers to ensure
the availability of service and access to
critical data. While the authors recognise the
lack of clarity at the present time they are still
optimistic for the future of cloud computing.
Despite the issues to be resolved, most
indications suggest that it will not be too
long before we won’t just be surfing the
web, we’ll be riding the cloud. ••
* Associate Professor Richard Constantine
is Swinburne University of Technology’s
Chief Information Officer.
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
Associate Professor
Richard Constantine
Cloud computing
‘Cloud computing’ allows
people to access software
applications and their own
files using any internetconnected
computer,
anywhere, at any time.
Commentary
3

swinburne June 2009
neuroscience
4
Australia’s first cognitive neuroscience ‘baby laboratory’ is hoping to learn how
infantile thoughts and gestures mature into deliberate action; how the human brain
develops and sometimes fails By Rebecca Thyer

June 2009 swinburne
Sitting on her mother’s lap with a tiny,
Velcro-covered mitten covering her 11-weekold
hand, Molly reaches for an object that
is similarly covered in Velcro. It’s a simple
move that defies what other babies her age
typically do, which is how young Molly
is helping researchers better understand
developing brain activity.
As a ‘baby scientist’ Molly is helping
researchers at Swinburne University of
Technology’s Brain Science Institute
learn more about a process called mirror
neuron activity – where the brain mirrors
the activity of another person, activating a
neuron response, even though no physical
movement occurs.
Leading the work is Dr Jordy Kaufman,
who moved to Melbourne from the University
of London, Birkbeck, to establish the
Swinburne Baby Laboratory in early 2008.
Dr Kaufman says Molly’s involvement in
the lab’s ‘Sticky Mittens’ project is allowing
researchers to explore brain development.
“At three months old babies are not good at
reaching for things, but with practice they
can do something like it. It may look like
they are just swiping or swatting at things,
but they are trying to get the toy.”
Previous US-led research has shown that
babies with ‘sticky mitten’ experience take
more of these bold, directive actions – that is,
they grab at objects more than other babies.
Sticky mitten research began about a
decade ago with Professor Amy Needham,
who supervised Dr Kaufman’s PhD in her
previous role at Duke University.
Now at the Department of Psychology
and Human Development at Nashville’s
Vanderbilt University, Professor Needham
says these types of projects help to build
an understanding of infant motor skill
development and the changes behind it.
“Development is a complex phenomenon
and we are only now starting to understand
the many ways in which different processes
influence each other as development takes
place,” she says.
Perhaps most importantly for those who
are exploring brain development, is that
babies with a sticky mitten experience also
watch the actions of others more closely.
And by carefully watching the actions of
others, there is the possibility of enhanced
brain development, allowing infants to better
interpret other people’s actions.
Swinburne’s Dr Kaufman says his sticky
mitten research will monitor this. “We want
to know if giving babies a sticky mitten
experience leads them to show more mirror
neuron activity than those without.”
To answer this question, Dr Kaufman
is studying the brain waves of two sets of
babies: those like Molly who have sticky
mitten experience and those without. In both
cases babies watch their parent grab for an
object while their brain waves are monitored.
“We are essentially finding out more about
the mind’s building blocks.”
The Swinburne Baby Laboratory monitors
these brain waves using a non-invasive
electroencephalogram (EEG). It works
in much the same way as a thermometer
measures temperature. A net of 128 sensors
is placed over a baby’s head to measure
naturally occurring brain activity. The sensors
capture the electrical signals coming from the
brain while the baby watches objects or listens
to sounds. Dr Kaufman says it is a completely
safe experience for the babies involved and
usually lasts between two and 15 minutes.
The work could also have commercial
ramifications. Dr Andy Bremner, a former
colleague of Dr Kaufman’s from the
University of London, Goldsmiths, says
that because sticky mitten research may
help to explain how active exploratory
experiences drive development, it could
provide toy manufacturers with evidence that
certain educational products are beneficial.
“Currently there is little evidence basis for
any benefit of such toys, but this research
could help to provide this.”
That aside, Dr Kaufman says what
drives the Swinburne Baby Laboratory is
the ability to provide insight into the minds
of infants and young children. Its work has
important ramifications for learning about the
development of autism and schizophrenia.
“Understanding how these conditions develop
could lead to more sensitive diagnostic
measures, and therefore earlier intervention.”
One way of doing this is to measure how
babies’ brains react to changes in sound, a
perceptual process called ‘change detection’,
Lab delves into our infancy
The Swinburne Baby Laboratory is Australia’s first cognitive neuroscience
facility for babies and infants.
It was established in early 2008 by Dr Jordy Kaufman, who became
interested in studying brain development when he undertook a cognitive
science degree at Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD at Duke
University with Professor Amy Needham. His interest then led him to
the UK to work with Professor Mark Johnson at the Centre for Brain and
Cognitive Development at the University of London, Birkbeck.
He wants to find out how the mental world of infants differs from that
of adults.
“We are more infantile than we think,” he says. “Only 10 to 15 per
cent of things we do now are different from what we did then. Yet, the
relationship between brain development and cognitive development in
babies is largely unknown.”
What drives Dr Kaufman is the desire to give scientists and parents
alike a window into this world from which we have all grown. “Almost
all parents at some point wonder what it is that their baby can see, hear,
feel, remember and understand. The Swinburne Baby Laboratory was
created to help answer these questions,” he says.
More information
• If you are a parent of a baby or child up to 5 years old, you can take part in
research at the Swinburne Baby Laboratory by emailing babylab@swin.edu.au
or visiting www.babylab.org
The more we know about the typically
developing brain, the more scientists can
discover markers for atypical development.
which forms the basis of another Swinburne
Baby Laboratory project. “Basically this
means we play some sounds and then change
it and see what their brain waves do.
“We know how adults’ brains respond
to auditory change – even in our sleep our
brains are aware of any changes in noise –
but do babies respond?”
Finding out if babies do respond to
auditory change could lead to a better
understanding of how autism and
schizophrenia develop. For example, people
with schizophrenia do not show the same
level of change detection as those without
it; and some people with autism are highly
sensitive to auditory change.
“So by monitoring how the brain develops
we might gain more insight into this,”
Dr Kaufman says. “The more we know
about the typically developing brain, the
more scientists can discover markers for
atypical development, perhaps leading to
early diagnostic tests and early interventions
to minimise the negative effects of atypical
brain development.” ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
neuroscience
5

swinburne June 2009
new technologies
6

June 2009 swinburne
,,
The passive end
of the fibre light
guide can be
rigidly mounted
for accurate
alignment with
the laser, while
the sensing
end can remain
flexible to make
contact with
the sample. In
this way the
sensor can
be packaged
into a thin,
flexible needle
and inserted
beneath the skin
with minimal
discomfort.”
Dr Paul Stoddart
illustration: Justin garnsworthy
Browsing the research posters at
a scientific conference in 2002, Paul
Stoddart was taken aback. Before him was
an electron micrograph of a cicada wing
that showed line after line of microscopic
pillars arrayed on the wing’s surface, a
pattern that resembled just the nanostructure
Dr Stoddart was looking for to improve the
sensitivity of a spectroscopy technique he
was using.
That chance sighting led Dr Stoddart, a
research fellow at Swinburne University of
Technology, to spend many days searching
suburban scrub for cicadas, removing their
wings and coating them with silver. This
was no amateur nature experiment; it was a
means of refining an optical fibre sensor that
would allow the continuous monitoring of
blood glucose levels in humans.
“When I saw these patterns of structure
on the cicada wings I thought they could be
of some interest to the sensor application.
So I coated a wing with silver and found it
produced excellent results,” Dr Stoddart says.
“The wings have an anti-reflection
coating to prevent them reflecting sunlight
and enhancing their camouflage. It turns
out that this type of anti-reflective coating
is exactly the kind of nanostructure suitable
for the spectroscopy technique – Surface
Enhanced Raman Scattering – that we use.
“The wing surface provides a scale of
roughness that is ideally suited to our needs.
When laser light illuminates the roughened
surface, which has been coated in silver
or gold, the light interacts with the surface
electrons in such a way that the Raman
scattering (the scattering of light photons) is
increased by a factor of a million … in other
words there is an amplification effect.”
Further, the particular ordered, pillarpattern
of the cicada wings adds a regularity
that allows the results to be replicated more
accurately.
Dr Stoddart and colleagues at Swinburne’s
Centre for Atom Optics and Ultrafast
Spectroscopy are using Surface Enhanced
Raman Scattering in the development of a
device that will constantly monitor blood
glucose levels in people with diabetes.
The research team has developed and
patented an optical fibre probe that could
Diabetes hope
on the wings of
silver cicadas
The wings of a familiar noisy insect, the cicada, were the
starting point for a device that will be able to continuously monitor
blood glucose levels By Penny Fannin
be used to monitor people’s blood glucose
levels in real time, instead of the periodic
tests diabetics must self-administer through
the course of each day. The probe fits inside
a small-gauge needle and Dr Stoddart
envisages both would be incorporated into
a wristwatch-style device. “The watch
would contain the laser and the optics and
the needle, with its fibre sensor, would be
plugged in.” With one end of the needle
plugged in to the device the other would
penetrate the skin.
Crucial to the success of such a device is
finding a way for the glucose in the blood to
interact with the sensor, Dr Stoddart says.
“These optical fibres are the diameter
of a hair and at the top of the hair we are
building this sensor device,” he says. “For
the sensing technique to work the optical
fibre needs to have a nanostructured metal
surface, preferably gold or silver, on its
tip,” he says. “The metal surface interacts
with the light passing through the optical
fibre and amplifies the signal returned from
the glucose by Surface Enhanced Raman
Scattering.” The signal is then translated
into a blood glucose reading through a
spectrum analyser that is built in to the
device.
“The fact that it’s an optical fibre sensor
is important because it removes the difficulty
of otherwise aligning a focused laser beam
with the sensor surface,” Dr Stoddart says.
“The passive end of the fibre light
guide can be rigidly mounted for accurate
alignment with the laser, while the sensing
end can remain flexible to make contact
with the sample. In this way the sensor can
be packaged into a thin, flexible needle
and inserted beneath the skin with minimal
discomfort.”
Traditionally, optical fibre sensors have
been used for industrial applications such
as monitoring temperatures in oil wells,
new technologies
7

swinburne june 2009
new technologies
8
Optical fibres help hearing surgeons ‘see’
Cochlear implants, or bionic ears, have dramatically improved the hearing of
more than 150,000 people worldwide. However, in a small number of cases,
the process of implanting the device can damage the delicate structures
inside the cochlea (the snail-shaped structure in the inner ear that contains
the organ of hearing).
At a trade show in 2007 Dr Paul Stoddart, a research fellow at
Swinburne’s Centre for Atom Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy, met
representatives from Australian cochlear implant manufacturer Cochlear
Ltd and began discussing the potential for optical fibre sensing devices to
prevent potential tissue damage during cochlear implantation.
“There might be some residual hearing left, so it would be better if the
surgeons could tell, during implantation, if they were pushing up against the
fine internal cochlea structures,” Dr Stoddart says.
Cochlear’s head of implant design and development Edmond Capcelea
says it is important to minimise any potential trauma to the internal cochlea
structures during implantation.
“Minimising trauma at insertion is really worthwhile,” he says. “Right
now this procedure is done without direct feedback in terms of insertion of
the electrode array into the cochlea. Direct, instant feedback during insertion
is preferable to lagging feedback, such as from patient performance.
“This development we’re running with Swinburne University of
Technology is part of our drive to develop smarter or superior electrode
arrays whereby the surgeons can get clues on whether they are touching the
delicate internal cochlea tissue during insertion of the electrode array.”
In collaboration with Cochlear, Dr Stoddart is investigating putting optical
fibre Bragg gratings into the electrode array of cochlear implants where they
could be used to guide the insertion of the array by the surgeon.
“Optical fibre Bragg gratings were first used in the telecommunications
industry to make optical fibre components, but the fibres can also be used
for sensing,” Dr Stoddart says.
Fibre Bragg gratings can be constructed in an optical fibre where they
reflect particular wavelengths of light and transmit others. “If you stretch the
fibre it can reflect longer wavelengths and if you compress it you can reflect
shorter wavelengths so it is a good strain sensor,” Dr Stoddart says.
“This is a very neat way of making an optical fibre filter without using
discrete elements; everything can be done in the optical fibre.”
Dr Stoddart says the research aims to put an optical fibre Bragg grating
in the electrode array of cochlear implants where it can detect any pressure
on the internal structures of the ear by monitoring a shift in the wavelength.
“In due time we want to be trialling the first of these sensors in an
implant. It will be a very significant development if we can get these fibres
routinely used in implants.”
– Penny Fannin
sensing strain in bridges or in optical fibre
gyroscopes in aeroplanes. Their use in
medical devices is only now being widely
explored.
Dr Stoddart hopes the optical fibre sensor
would be used as an alternative to the
existing finger-prick test for measuring blood
glucose levels. In this test a small lancet
is used to puncture the fingertip and the
resulting drop of blood is placed on a testing
strip. The strip is then put in a blood glucose
monitor that reads the blood sugar level.
“The problem with the finger-prick test
is you get snapshots of your glucose level;
there might be five or six measurements
per day, but you don’t know what’s
happening in between those measurements,”
Dr Stoddart says.
“Our approach provides minimally
invasive, continuous monitoring. If you
want a controlled system you need to have
continuous monitoring.”
Dr Barry Dixon, the head of clinical
research in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU)
of Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital,
says there is a clinical need for continuous
glucose monitoring that is less invasive and
more efficient than current methods.
Critically ill patients in the ICU are
medically unstable and have problems with
glucose control so their glucose levels are
regularly monitored, Dr Dixon says.
“At the moment in the ICU we take fourhourly
blood glucose measurements and
then work out how much insulin we should
give,” Dr Dixon says. “Our ICU is a 12-bed
ICU so with 12 patients we would be doing
that pretty much all the time. That adds up
to a lot of blood tests and a lot of time spent
measuring insulin needs.”
“Long-term, I hope we can set up a
continuous glucose measurement where the
device goes into the skin a small distance
and that, as the technology improves, the
measurements will become non-invasive and
can be made just with a light source.”
Such a novel application for optical fibre
sensors started with the Diabetes Australia
Research Trust providing seed funding for
Swinburne’s research. Further funding over
the past five years from the National Health
and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
and ASX-listed company BioPharmica Ltd
(BPH) has seen the research program make
significant achievements.
At the moment Dr Stoddart’s device is
about the size of a lunch box. Although some
of the components will need to be smaller,
the research focus now is on improving the
stability of the sensor.
He says for the glucose in the blood to
absorb onto the sensor the metal surface
needs to be treated with a chemical. “You
need this intimate connection between
the sensor and the glucose to take the
measurement,” he says.
Commercially available chemicals have
been trialled and the research team has
identified a treatment that allows detection of
glucose at the lowest physiological levels in
which they occur in humans.
“At this stage the surface treatment only
lasts for some minutes, we need to improve
that to several days.” Dr Stoddart says there
are well-established methods of doing that
but they need to be worked through.
He envisages the wristwatch device would
need to have its sensor replaced every few
days. For this to happen the sensors need to
be produced quickly and in high numbers.
That’s where the cicada wings become
important.
Dr Stoddart, in collaboration with
Associate Professor Arnan Mitchell’s group
at RMIT University, has been using a
technique called nanoimprint lithography to
make copies of the cicada wing patterns at a
nano scale. The technique involves making
a mould of the wing surface and pressing
it into a layer of heated plastic on the tip
of an optical fibre. This creates an accurate
imprinted copy of the nanoscopic pattern
found on each wing. The imprinted tip can
then be coated with gold or silver to make
the sensor.
Dr Stoddart says that when his team first
used nanoimprint lithography to make the
moulds about one tip an hour was being
produced. “Funding from the NHMRC
has allowed us to increase that by a factor
of 100 and at that rate the process can be
commercially viable. Because the sensors are
disposable we need to be able to do that.”
At current rates of progress he estimates
the device would be available for trials in
five years.
“By developing medical applications for
optical fibre sensors we can find a way to
make a difference to people’s lives,” he says.
“Whenever I talk about this diabetes work I
ask for a show of hands from people with a
family member or friend with diabetes; it’s
amazing how many people put their hands
up. You don’t get that when you’re working
with oil wells.” ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine

June 2009 swinburne
Alloy research
cuts through the fighter cost barrier
story by Rebecca Thyer
Defence is an expensive business. Strike
aircraft weapons systems, for example,
don’t come cheap. But their necessity, and
these strained economic times, means more
research is being put into reducing their cost
of production.
So what on the surface is a conventional
cost-cutting exercise – to reduce titanium
machining costs and improve productivity
– also has important ramifications for an
international military project led by the US.
Run by the US Department of Defense, the
Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program is looking
to not only produce the next generation of
defence aircraft for the US military and its
allies, including Australia – which has a
$16 billion tentative order for 100 F-35 JSFs
– but to also make them more affordable.
An important aspect of achieving this is
being able to reduce the cost of machining
titanium alloys. Their high strength-toweight
ratio, the ability to retain that strength
at high temperatures, and high corrosion
resistance compared with other alloys
has long made this metal attractive to the
aerospace, marine, chemical, petroleum and
biomedical industries.
However, titanium alloys are difficult
to machine, even with modern cutting
technology. This is due to of a number of
factors:
the way the alloy changes shape when
machined;
its low thermal conductivity, which makes
it difficult to remove heat from the cutting
region, increasing the temperature and
contributing to a chemical interaction with
the cutting tool’s material; and
the alloy’s low elastic modulus, which
means the material is easily deformed
during machining.
The F-35
The Royal Australian
Air Force has placed a
tentative order, worth
$16 billion, for 100 of
the Lockheed Martin
F-35 Lightning II joint
strike fighters.
The F-35 is a
supersonic, multi-role,
fifth-generation stealth
fighter. Three variants
derived from a common
design, developed
together and using the
same infrastructure
worldwide, will replace
at least 13 types of
aircraft for 11 nations
initially, making the
Lightning II the most
cost-effective fighter
program in history.
More information
• www.jsf.mil
Added together it means that it takes
longer to machine titanium alloys compared
with other metals and tools are worn out
faster, resulting in high machining costs.
Tackling this problem – the resolution
of which would have benefits for
manufacturing worldwide – is Australia’s
CAST Cooperative Research Centre (CRC).
The CRC, which includes Swinburne
University of Technology, conducts industrydriven
research into the use of aluminium,
magnesium, titanium, cast iron and steel.
Its CEO, George Collins, says the CAST
CRC has been working to reduce titanium
production costs for several years, and has
been funding Swinburne to work on the
laser-assisted turning of titanium. “It was a
‘blue sky’ project for us and one of only two
strategic research projects we fund. But it
caught the attention of Lockheed Martin.”
US-based Lockheed Martin is the global
security and IT consultancy responsible for
delivering on the goals of the US Defense
Department’s JSF program.
Dr Don Kinard, Lockheed Martin’s
technical operations deputy for F-35 global
production operations, says titanium alloys
are widely used on the F-35 Lightning II,
a strike fighter being developed by the
JSF Program.
“Machined and forged titanium parts are
used routinely in high temperature areas such
the engine compartment, where aluminium
alloys cannot operate efficiently,” Dr Kinard
says. “Titanium is also used in other
structural F-35 applications, where it saves
sufficient weight to justify the increased
production cost.
“For example, the use of machined/
forged titanium parts is more pronounced on
the F-35 carrier variant because of the high
loads which that airplane encounters during
carrier landings.”
Interested in the results Swinburne’s
Professor Milan Brandt was getting –
including that lasers make it possible
to quicken the turning process at the
same lathe power, while improving the
finished product’s surface integrity thereby
maintaining its strength and corrosionresistance
properties – Lockheed Martin
paid a visit while in Australia touring local
research capability.
Professor Brandt says Lockheed Martin
was interested in the laser-assisted turning
project, but wanted to know if the same
results could be gained from laser-assisted
milling.
It is a question that Professor Brandt’s
team – which includes his Industrial
Research Institute Swinburne colleagues
Dr Shoujin Sun, Girish Thipperudrappa,
Andy Moore and PhD student Nancy Yang
– is now half-way through answering via
another CAST CRC project, one that is
funded by Lockheed Martin.
The research team uses a laser to heat
the material surface, with a beam directed
in front of the cutting tool, allowing the
material to be cut with greater ease.
Experiments vary the laser power,
machining speed and depth of cut. “We
want to find out why the reduction in cutting
forces occurs with the heat of the laser and
at what distance from the cutting tool,”
Professor Brandt says.
So far, results for milling are as positive
as those of laser-assisted turning. “But we
need to do more experiments and see how
we could integrate a laser and the cutting
tool. That’s the long-term objective and
ultimate aim of the Lockheed Martin work –
to deliver the technical data needed to design
an all-in-one machine.”
Professor Brandt says the idea to use
lasers came from previous research on
ceramics, another hard-to-machine material.
“All we are trying to do is translate that to
titanium. If we can increase the removal rate
and increase tool life, then we can reduce the
cost of machining and using titanium.”
The research also allows for his team to
examine the fundamental science behind
laser-assisted titanium machining – and
already Dr Sun has a new theory on titanium
cutting.
“At the end of the day it is all leading to
machining titanium faster but maintaining a
quality surface. Our objective is to increase
the understanding of the cutting process and
translate that into practical information.” ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
manufacturing
9

swinburne June 2009
Swinburne’s Professor Min Gu is working on developing solar cells that use
sunlight more efficiently and cost half as much to produce.
solar power
10
All power
to the sun and the light team
PHOTO: Newspix / Paul Loughnan
Affordable solar
power may
soon be just
a flick of the
switch away
By
Robin Taylor
What began decades ago as a friendship
between two university students in Shanghai
has led to a multi-million-dollar research
project with the potential to produce nextgeneration
solar power as affordable as
fossil-fuel-derived energy.
The collaboration between Swinburne
University of Technology and China-based
Suntech Power – one of the world’s largest
manufacturers of solar panels – aims to
develop solar cells that are twice as efficient
and half the cost of existing cells.
If the project is successful, the new
technology – which makes more efficient use
of sunlight – could be on the market within
five years and close the gap between solar
and fossil fuels.
The project is led by Suntech CEO
Dr Zhengrong Shi and the head of
Swinburne’s Centre for Micro-Photonics,
Professor Min Gu, and builds on a friendship
that began at university and continued in
Australia when they began working side-byside
at the University of New South Wales in
the late 1980s.
Since then Dr Shi’s Suntech has become
the world’s largest producer of crystalline
silicon solar panels, and Professor Gu a
leader in micro-photonics research.
Research-wise they have followed
different paths while maintaining a shared
interest in light: Professor Gu pursued
research on laser fusion and micro-photonics
and Dr Shi was part of the pioneering team
that developed thin solar cell technology, a
breakthrough that dramatically reduced the
cost of solar cells.
Today, their paths have crossed again in a
research collaboration which they hope will
increase solar-energy uptake by producing
cheaper and more efficient solar cells.
Professor Gu explains that although thinfilm
technology uses 100 times less silicon
than conventional cells, thereby reducing the
cost of photovoltaic solar panels, the cells’
poor absorption of near infrared light limits
their performance.
And light performance is of particular
interest to Professor Gu. At the Centre for
Micro-Photonics, he and his colleagues study
the process of converting light to energy and

June 2009 swinburne
how to make that process more efficient.
A major focus of his research is the study
of photonic crystals – tiny structures that
can manipulate and control light by multiple
reflection. Professor Gu came up with the
idea of developing these photonic crystals to
act as solar cells – to convert light to energy
– and suggested it to Dr Shi.
Professor Gu says the new solar cells use a
combination of photonic crystals treated with
metallic nanoparticles, together with thin-film
photovoltaic technology. The combination
should enable the efficient collection of solar
energy in a wider colour range, making the
cells twice as efficient and significantly less
costly to make than other cells.
The new solar cells use nanoparticles to
trap light into a thin-film photovoltaic cell.
“Basically, if you can slow down the light
it will stay in the solar cell longer and thus
convert more light to electricity,” Professor
Gu says. “If you are able to trap the light
in the part of the solar cell where the
conversion is taking place, it becomes even
more efficient.”
Professor Gu and his colleagues have
already started work on a model cell, which
will be produced on a pilot scale at Suntech
in China.
“By working with Suntech in the
development phase, we can ensure the
technology can be transferred to the
production line,” he says.
Swinburne signed the agreement
with Suntech Power in April and each
organisation will contribute $3 million.
The project is also seeking funding from the
Victorian Government.
Professor Gu believes the group’s
combination of research and business
expertise will allow it to develop and
manufacture the revolutionary solar cells
within five years.
Although he has been approached by
other institutes to pursue similar research,
Dr Shi says he selected the Swinburne team
because of its expertise in nanotechnology,
which he believes will play an important role
in next-generation solar technology.
For solar power to succeed as a
replacement for existing methods of
generating electricity, it must be able to
compete with fossil fuel technologies in
terms of cost and performance and Dr Shi
believes that the new technology could lead
to solar power becoming as cheap as energy
derived from fossil fuels.
And, although Australian demand for
Nanophotonics Down Under 2009
A meeting will be held in Melbourne in June to discuss the emerging field
of nanophotonics, which is becoming increasingly important in photonics
applications such as solar energy, information technology, biomedicine and
consumer electronics.
Nanophotonics Down Under 2009 Devices and Applications (SMONP 2009)
will bring together international specialists from industry and academia
to identify key challenges in the emerging applications of nanophotonics.
The event will also provide a forum for scientists, engineers and industry
representatives to develop new strategic alliances and partnerships.
The program includes a public lecture on Sunday 21 June to increase
public awareness of the importance of nanophotonics in future technological
applications. The lecture, by Professor Martin Green from the University of
New South Wales, will focus on solar energy.
More information
• Nanophotonics Down Under 2009 Devices and Applications, 21-24 June, Melbourne
Convention and Exhibition Centre, www.smonp2009.com
solar power accounts for less than 1 per cent
of the total world market, he says there are
many positive indications for the future of
the industry in Australia, such as the growing
interest and public support for renewable
energy solutions.
The collaborative research group will
eventually be housed in Swinburne’s new
Advanced Technology Centre, a $130 million
development due for completion in
early 2011.
Dr Shi is a guest speaker at this year’s
Nanophotonics Down Under conference. ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
Solar Power
11
IMAGINE
WITH ACCOUNTANTS.
How can calculators and balance sheets be used to combat crime?
Accounting Professor Suresh Cuganesan is a leading researcher in performance
measurement who is helping Victoria Police and the Australian Crime Commission
combat organised crime. Read all about it in Swinburne Magazine back issues,
available when you subscribe online at www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
For more fascinating Swinburne discoveries, subscribe online for free.
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swinburne June 2009
‘green’ business
12
Companies find
a competitive
green
edge
A business environmental mentoring program
is showing that ‘going green’ can win customers
and profits By Robin Taylor
David Van Berkel of
Garden Express.
Yarra Valley nurseryman David Van
Berkel was annoyed that people passing
his stand at garden shows would take his
company brochures but leave behind his
plastic showbag. So he came up with an
innovative solution – he asked his supplier to
put a perforated strip across the bottom of the
bag, which customers could tear off to turn
the bag into a tree guard. People now happily
accept the plastic carrier. It’s useful to them
and becomes a marketing tool for the nursery.
It’s a subtle piece of creative thinking,
which Mr Van Berkel attributes to his
participation in the Business Transformer
Program, run by the National Centre for
Sustainability at Swinburne University of
Technology.
He is one of a growing number of
business owners and operators who
have completed the centre’s program
set up to help companies develop more
environmentally sustainable practices.
Mr Van Berkel participated in a 12-month
program run in collaboration with the Shire
of Yarra Ranges (see accompanying story).
The centre’s team leader for business and
community sustainability, Scott McKenry,
says the program is designed to encourage
business owners to think differently about
their products and services; how they are
offered, and how they can be future-proofed
through sustainable growth strategies.
photo: paul Jones

June 2009 swinburne
“We take businesses out of their operational
headspace,” he says.
While the centre’s core business is
education, it also develops and delivers
community and business programs in
collaboration with industry, local councils
and communities, which is how the Business
Transformer Program started. The program,
which began in 2006, was originally funded
by Sustainability Victoria and the Victorian
Environment Protection Authority.
In its first year a number of large
organisations such as Pilkington Glass (now
Viridian), Huntsman Chemicals and the City
of Melbourne participated in the program.
Mr McKenry says a notable outcome of that
first program was that Pilkington Glass was
able to secure multi-million-dollar funding
from Sustainability Victoria to build a new
manufacturing facility to make ‘comfort
glass’, which is used in buildings to achieve
a five-star energy rating.
The Business Transformer Program
operates with local councils within a particular
geographical area to encourage businesses to
work together. Twelve businesses participated
in the Yarra Ranges program.
Mr McKenry says the council identified
businesses that were looking for support to
minimise natural resource use, reduce waste
and greenhouse gas emissions, and engage
more effectively, from an environmental
and commercial perspective, with their local
communities.
The Yarra Ranges businesses, which
ranged from a winery to a company
producing cable and antenna systems, showed
that improved environmental performance can
clearly be good business. Over the program’s
12 months the businesses recorded average
cuts in energy consumption of 8 to 10
per cent. This represented a $100,000 saving
in energy bills and a reduction of about
1800 tonnes in carbon dioxide emissions.
This result was achieved by each business
running (with the centre’s help) its own
project – for example, working with its
supply chain to reduce packaging, improve
efficiency or implementing a behaviourchange
program for customers or staff.
The program includes seminars covering
people’s own business case for sustainability
and stakeholder engagement and these
are supplemented by in-house workshops
on themes like behaviour change, carbon
management, energy efficiency, water
efficiency and project planning.
Advisers from the centre also visit
businesses to help build some of the
benchmarks for measuring progress in areas
such as energy and water use and waste.
The Business Transformer Program
stays abreast of international trends and
developments through the participation of
a Canadian business sustainability expert,
Dr Bob Willard.
Dr Willard says the program’s
distinguishing characteristic is the
opportunity it gives participants to apply
what they learn to a real initiative in their
organisation. “Because the program takes a
year to complete, they have a chance to roll
up their sleeves, apply their knowledge, and
learn from their successes and challenges
and those of other participants,” he says.
“This helps people become more effective
leaders of subsequent projects.”
From his international perspective,
Dr Willard says Australian businesses tend to
work more cooperatively with government
on sustainability issues than businesses in
other countries. “I also sense that Australian
business leaders are more open to good ideas
from elsewhere and are not as inhibited by
the NIH (‘not invented here’) factor. That’s
refreshing.”
In 2008 businesses in the City of
Casey took part in a shorter version of the
transformer program, and in 2009 the City of
Knox (both are Melbourne municipalities) is
also partnering a program for businesses in
its area.
Mr McKenry says the program is modular
and can be set up and run as required for a
particular council. In response to industry
input, the program now includes more
content on issues related to climate change
and carbon accounting.
Businesses pay a fee, on a sliding scale
according to their size, to participate. The
cost ranges from $1500 for companies with
fewer than 100 employees, to $3000 for
businesses with 100 to 300 employees, and a
negotiable rate for larger companies.
Mr McKenry says that while the programs
to date have all been run by Swinburne in
Victoria, there is potential to run them in
other states through the centre’s collaborative
network. ••
The National Centre for Sustainability
is a collaboration of several institutions
across Australia: Swinburne University of
Technology (Victoria), Sunraysia Institute
of TAFE (Victoria), University of Ballarat
(Victoria), South West Institute of TAFE
(Victoria), Challenger TAFE (Western
Australia) and Tropical North Queensland
Institute of TAFE.
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
Case study
Business blooms from
an unexpected marketing edge
For Garden Express owner David Van Berkel, being involved in the Business
Transformer Program provided a fresh perspective on opportunities,
which he says he would otherwise not have thought of, for marketing his
company’s green credentials.
Garden Express is a mail order and online garden centre. It publishes a
catalogue five times a year and also produces wholesale flower bulbs for
the nursery industry.
Mr Van Berkel says he started the course just focused on recycling and
energy savings and only as the course progressed did he realise that these
could also create marketing opportunities.
“I became aware that we needed to produce a more environmentally
friendly package and market that to our customers,” he says. “The best
thing for me was to use the power of my catalogues and database to tell
my customers what we were doing to become green.”
He says the quickest and easiest change the company made was
reducing energy use in the workplace. Simply by educating staff about
the potential savings to be gained by turning off unused equipment, the
company was able to reduce energy consumption by about 10 per cent, at
no cost, and Mr Van Berkel regards that as just the start.
He said the program showed people how these sorts of changes could
improve their business, and even if the change did not result directly in
additional profit it created a stronger relationship with customers through
being seen to be “doing the right thing”.
He says another gain from the program was the network it created with
other businesses in the shire: “A cable production company is completely
different to a flower bulb company but, at the end of the day, if you run a
machine you are in the same business of using resources.”
Carbon accountants queue
for accreditation
In keeping with the political momentum building behind a national carbon
trading scheme, Swinburne’s National Centre for Sustainability has
been inundated with demand for its course in carbon accounting. Since
introducing the course (Australia’s first accredited carbon accounting course)
in May 2008, a steady stream of budding carbon accountants have signed up
to become accredited.
A significant part of the centre’s work in the past few years has been
developing greenhouse gas management strategies for businesses. Scott
McKenry says this work often involves partnering with the country’s
foremost experts in the field, who now act as course facilitators.
“We haven’t even marketed the course and every intake has been full,”
he says.
Last year, eight groups of 16 participants completed the course and this
year another 14 groups of 16 are scheduled to take part.
“There are a lot of consultants who want accreditation, as well as
people from emissions-intensive industries and local councils, many of
which will have potential liabilities under an emissions trading scheme,”
Mr McKenry says.
The hands-on course requires participants to carry out carbon
accounting in their workplace and provide evidence to show they can
develop an emissions inventory and report.
More information
• www.swinburne.edu.au/ncs/Education/CarbonAcc.html
‘green’ business
13

swinburne JUne 2009
Maren Rawlings
workplace
14
No joke when it’s
survival of
the funniest
story by Bianca Nogrady & Rebecca Thyer
In uncertain economic times when many
people are worried about keeping their jobs,
it’s understandable that some workplaces
may be losing the jocular banter that
otherwise relieves the working day.
But this doesn’t mean that humour has left
the office. Quite the contrary, it seems, with
humour acquiring a competitive edge as it
becomes part of some people’s survival strategy.
Qualitative evidence uncovered by
,,
When stress
levels increase
people tend
to use their
humour
competitively.”
Maren Rawlings
photo: paul Jones
Swinburne PhD researcher Maren Rawlings
suggests that some types of humour – the
type that targets particular people as the butt
of jokes – regularly occurs in the workplace.
And this type of humour could be on the rise.
Ms Rawlings, a psychologist in
Swinburne’s Faculty of Life and Social
Sciences and a former teacher, says that the
rate of competitive humour clearly increases
as work environments become more stressed.
“People are very generous to each other
when things are going well, but that starts
to change when workplaces become tense.
People start to compete and humour becomes
strategic.”
Although it might seem a trivial
consequence of a downturn in global fortunes,
this sort of humour has wider implications.
Ms Rawlings’s research is finding,
unsurprisingly, that ‘bad humour’ can reduce
people’s job satisfaction and their perception
of their own and others’ productivity.
Ms Rawlings has measured the impact
on organisations of how humour is used at
work. This has led to her development of a
tool that assesses workplace humour.
Called the Humour at Work scale (HAW)
it is a proxy measure of the atmosphere of
a workplace and it predicts employees’ job
satisfaction. She has found that it can explain
variations in productivity between offices or
worksites.
The HAW scale is likely to be
commercialised later this year for use by
human resources units to sample an office
climate, without the need to ask unwelcome
questions. “It asks about humour in the
workplace, not about an individual’s fear or
job satisfaction, so workers are more likely
to respond to it,” Ms Rawlings says.
Ms Rawlings began studying how humour
is used at work and the difference it can
make to the office environment as part of her
PhD at Swinburne, with Dr Bruce Findlay.
She wrote 150 items, 75 about how an
individual uses humour and 75 about how an
individual sees other people use humour, and
gave them to more than 350 participants in
an international internet survey.
From this research, which examined the
reasons why people use humour and also
other people’s reactions to that humour, she
was able to articulate two clear sets of factors
defining ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ humour
environments. These led to two scales: one
for a pleasant climate where humour puts
people at ease and its flipside, an unpleasant
climate, where humour is nasty.
The next step was to ascertain what
difference these climates made. To answer
this, Ms Rawlings surveyed 400 Australian
working people to calibrate her humour scale
against job satisfaction and other workplace
measures, including one that predicted
productivity. She found the more there was
positive humour in a workplace, the more
satisfied employees were. This shouldn’t
come as a surprise, but she found it did fly
in the face of a common management belief
that ‘joking around’ was bad for workplace
efficiency.
High results on the unpleasant humour
climate scale correlated strongly with low
job satisfaction and with low scores on the
occupational climate measure that predicted
productivity.
Continuing research has allowed her
to show that an unpleasant workplace
environment, particularly the presence
of negative humour, could be increasing
people’s anxiety at work and eroding people’s
job satisfaction so much that productivity
levels could be reduced by nearly 20 per cent
compared with those being achieved in more
relaxed or ‘fun’ workplaces.
Because her research has coincided
with the deteriorating global economy,
Ms Rawlings has received anecdotal
evidence on its impact on office humour
too: “People are either saying there is now
no humour at work or that the humour is
grim,” she says. “Also, when stress levels
increase people tend to use their humour
competitively.” ••
* Ms Rawlings’ humour knowledge has been
recognised internationally. In July 2008 she
was awarded a Certificate of Merit and a
cash prize from the International Society
for Humour Studies for her postgraduate
presentation at its conference in Spain.
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine

June 2009 swinburne
New environment to debug
global-scale I.T. upgrades
story by David Adams
Testing new computer systems before they
go live is usually standard procedure for
introducing new software across a business.
But when it comes to large, distributed
systems such as those used by global
companies, this is not an easy exercise.
While existing testing technologies can
emulate, to a certain extent, enterprisescale
IT environments, they tend to be
time-consuming to deploy and require
considerable resources to operate. There
is a lack of scalable testing environments
that can efficiently and realistically imitate
the complex interactions that occur among
the tens of thousands of systems across big
businesses on a daily basis.
Professor Jun Han, who heads
Swinburne University of Technology’s
Software and Enterprise Systems research
program, says that a typical large enterprise
will have thousands of different IT
systems supporting various parts of the
business (from procurement to personnel
management, and involving different
software and hardware), each of which may
need to interact with the other.
For example, he says employees often
have specific clearances to access different
IT systems – a set-up that is usually
done with one entry through an identity
management system, which will talk to all
the other systems.
But the identity management system itself
needs to be tested before being deployed.
“And that generally is a problem,”
Professor Han says. “How do you test this
software? You can’t test it in a production
environment, and in a development
environment you can’t set up a realistic
physical testing environment running
10,000 systems.”
The existing methods for testing
scenarios such as this are complex and
cumbersome and there is currently no single
method or tool that can efficiently test all
the issues involved.
It is necessary to rely on a combination
of tools and techniques, each of which tests
different facets of the issues that may arise
in large-scale inter-connected enterprise
environments. Examples of these techniques
include networks of virtual machines, load
generation tools and custom scripts and
software agents.
Setting up
a network of
virtual machines,
for example,
may involve running up to
100 machines and seeing whether
they interact correctly.
“This may work with
100 systems but not with
1000 or 10,000 systems, in
meeting quality expectations
like response time and
throughput,” Professor
Han says.
It is a global challenge and Professor
Han is now leading a collaborative
research project between Swinburne and an
international IT group, CA Labs, to develop
a software environment that runs on just
one or two computers while emulating
widely distributed computing conditions and
systems within a business.
Using a scalable prototype system means
that the testing environment can involve
as many systems as required and provide a
realistic enterprise setting.
Alongside the ability to conduct
functional and performance testing
on a large scale, Professor Han says
it is envisaged that the new emulation
environment being developed would also
enable other system qualities – such as
how the system responds to delay or to
unpredictable behaviour – to be more
accurately tested than has previously
been possible.
“That’s the ‘it’ factor we want to achieve
in this emulation environment: to emulate
thousands of systems in real time with
predetermined and unpredictable behaviour.
It’s about quality assurance (QA), knowing
that a new system will function properly, no
matter how many systems it needs to talk to
and even if some of these systems are not
available or down.”
The project is being funded by CA Labs,
which was established by global software
firm CA in 2005 to strengthen relationships
between the company and research
communities. It has been running for two
years and is expected to continue beyond its
initial three-year timetable.
illustration: Justin garnsworthy
,,
That’s the ‘it’
factor we want
to achieve in
this emulation
environment:
to emulate
thousands of
systems in
real time with
predetermined
and
unpredictable
behaviour.”
Professor
Jun Han
As well as
Professor Han, the team of
Swinburne researchers working
on the project includes Dr Jean-Guy
Schneider, Dr Lars Grunske and PhD
student Cameron Hine.
The project is based on, and further
extends, Swinburne’s research expertise in
system integration, software architecture,
and system performance and reliability.
A prototype system, known as REACTO,
was demonstrated at the four-day CA World
conference in Las Vegas in November
2008. The demonstration emulated 10,000
enterprise systems successfully interacting
with CA’s ‘Identity Manager’ software as
the system under test.
Dr Steve Versteeg, a research staff
member at CA Labs in Melbourne and also
a member of the project team, says the
concept has already attracted considerable
interest within CA and its customer base,
which represents many of the world’s largest
enterprises.
Noting that while all CA software is
already comprehensively tested before
it goes out, Dr Versteeg adds that the
scalable emulation project would further
enhance that.
“QA has existing methods for testing the
scalability of a system,” he notes. “What
this can do is to unify that and simplify and
extend it.” ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
Information Technology
15

swinburne June 2009
Dark mysteries
lure cosmic surveyors
Astrophysics
16
A massive survey of the universe is under way in Australia to detect the faintest of echoes: an
acoustic ‘wiggle’ from the Big Bang. A wiggle that may hold the key to understanding a mysterious
new force – dark energy – that is causing the universe to fly apart By Gio Braidotti

June 2009 swinburne
The Milky Way’s parade across Earth’s
night sky offers a glittering view of our
home galaxy and a glimpse of the billions
of galaxies in the cosmos beyond. However,
despite this night sky splendour, an image
taken by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite shows
that viewing platforms on Earth can see
2009 Year of Astronomy
This year is the International Year of Astronomy:
a worldwide celebration of astronomy, held to
mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo turning
a telescope to the sky. Australia is one of
63 countries participating.
More information
• www.astronomy2009.org.au
Emily Wisnioski (left) and
Dr Sarah Brough.
photo: paul Jones
only a tiny part, perhaps just 3 per cent, of
the known universe.
Most of the remainder appears to be
something quite new to human discovery –
dark energy. This is the mysterious property
that is causing the universe’s expansion to
accelerate in ways that confound fundamental
physics. It may eventually challenge
Einstein’s general theory of relativity and his
theory that gravity is the force that should
counter-balance cosmic expansion.
This dark energy has only been known
to science for about a decade and is not to
be confused with dark matter, which was
discovered more than half a century ago.
Dark matter has a gravitational ‘pull’ because
of its mass, but something is overcoming
this to allow the universe to ‘push’ outwards
and keep expanding. It is this ‘push’ that
scientists have called dark energy.
Dark energy’s discovery in the late-
1990s was a shock for astrophysicists, who
promptly initiated a suite of investigations to
understand the relevance of dark energy to
the origin, evolution, composition and fate of
the universe.
One of these initiatives was the WiggleZ
Dark Energy Survey, which is being
undertaken at the Centre for Astrophysics
and Supercomputing at Swinburne University
of Technology. The WiggleZ team is a
collaboration between Swinburne and several
other Australian institutions and is attempting
to measure the distances separating 200,000
galaxies as the universe expands.
These observations have been made
possible by a powerful new spectrograph
at the Anglo-Australian Telescope in
Coonabarabran, NSW. Called AAOmega,
the instrument can image 392 galaxies an
hour, despite the galaxies being located half
the distance of the universe away. Data from
NASA’s orbiting Galaxy Evolution Explorer
(GALEX) satellite is helping the Australian
team select where to probe in the night sky.
Swinburne astrophysicist Dr Sarah
Brough explains that AAOmega measures
the ‘redshift’ in light emitted by the target
galaxies. Redshift is the increase that
occurs in light’s wavelength if the emitting
light-source is moving away from us. The
existence of redshift in starlight is the
evidence used to support the theory that the
universe is expanding.
Dr Brough says that because redshift
increases the further a galaxy moves away
from us, the AAOmega observations provide
a measure of the physical distance between
Earth and the galaxy. By observing galaxies
located at a range of distances from Earth,
separation between galaxies can be measured
at various ages of the universe. It is this that
provides a history of cosmic expansion.
By observing 200,000 galaxies, the
WiggleZ team is creating a huge database of
separation distances. When enough of these
measurements are plotted, a characteristic
‘wiggle’ appears in the distribution.
“More accurately termed ‘baryon acoustic
oscillations’, wiggles indicate that galaxies
have a small but detectable preference for
a particular separation distance that was
imprinted into the universe shortly after
the Big Bang,” Dr Brough says. “Wiggles
formed as a result of acoustic waves
travelling through the baryon-photon plasma
before these particles cooled and separated
into matter and radiation.”
Since the imprinted separation
distance remains constant at a fixed scale,
astrophysicists are attempting to use them
as ‘rulers’ against which to measure cosmic
expansion.
Swinburne PhD student Emily Wisnioski,
from the US, explains that wiggles amount to
a small preference for pairs of galaxies to be
separated by a distance of 150 megaparsecs
(Mpc) (a measure of distance equivalent to
3.26 million light years).
“The WiggleZ survey will provide an
independent measure, over vast cosmic
distances of this 150Mpc ‘standard ruler’
that was first determined by the WMAP
satellite,” she says.
Taken together, the separation
measurements can be fed into equations that
describe the universe’s underlying contents,
allowing the team to deduce properties of
dark energy. The more accurately they can
measure distances that separate galaxies, the
more can be learnt about dark energy.
In 2009 the team is well past the half-way
point in its observations, with the survey
due for completion in 2010. With enough
data to start preliminary analysis, the team
is on track to confirm and measure dark
energy with the greatest level of accuracy
yet achieved.
Since fitting dark energy into existing
theoretical frameworks is impossible, this
means the universe has, paradoxically,
become more mysterious as observations
became more powerful. As the
astrophysicists see it, dark energy provides
an extraordinary opportunity to challenge
fundamental theories and they foresee
profound impacts in our understanding of
physics, string theory or quantum gravity.
Stay tuned … ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
Astrophysics
17

swinburne June 2009
Alumni profile
18
Dani’s
journey
across
big art on
a small
canvas
Graphic designer Dani Poon.
Born in China and raised in Hong Kong, Dani Poon travelled nervously to Melbourne as a
17-year-old to stamp Australian art into her destined way By Kellie Penfold
photo: paul Jones
When Dani Poon visited her parents in Hong
Kong last year she found one of her most
cherished childhood possessions – three
stamp albums filled with philatelic treasures
that she had steamed off envelopes that
arrived from around the world.
The rediscovery of this childhood passion
resonated with her belief that destiny works
in strange ways and that the brave step to
come to Australia as a teenager to study art
at Swinburne University of Technology was
indeed her destined path.
Fourteen years later it is her own rich
and colourful art that is captivating stamp
collectors around the world. A freelance
graphic designer who works from a
Collingwood design studio shared with
fellow Swinburne graduates, Dani is one of
the privileged few artists chosen by Australia
Post to design its stamps.
For Dani it is the realisation of every
artist’s secret hope: immortality. “Designing
stamps or money is the ultimate – your work
lives on long after you are gone,” she says.
Dani’s art graces stamps across the range
from 15 to 55 cents and the comparatively
broad $1.65 ‘canvas’.
Dani feels that the combined influences
of her Chinese heritage and her adopted
Australian way of seeing things has
endowed her with a slightly quixotic
perspective. “I can be very sentimental,”
she says of her designs and the stories she
creates to support them, particularly those
that Australia Post uses to celebrate the
Chinese New Year.

June 2009 swinburne
Each year Dani creates 14 stamps for the
Chinese New Year series: “I am in the perfect
role for my experience and background.”
While Australia Post gives her free
reign with the design, which starts as a
series of concepts and is worked through
using computer imagery, the stamps must
incorporate traditional Chinese colours – red,
green and gold. The stamps also have to tell
the story of the animal represented. In the
12-year Chinese lunar cycle 2009 is the Year
of the Ox and last year, the first of the cycle,
was the Year of the Rat.
To develop the storyline, Dani immerses
herself in animal stories (she now has a
large library of animal books for inspiration
and reference) and Chinese and Australian
culture. More than 20 countries around the
world issue stamps to celebrate Chinese New
Year and Dani enjoys seeing the various
global interpretations, noting with a mildly
critical eye how many look like Disney
characters.
It takes about five months to complete
each year’s series, along with the storyline,
and already 2010’s Year of the Tiger
stamps are almost complete. When not
creating postage stamps Dani’s freelance
work is wide-ranging, although her animal
stamps are never far from her thoughts.
She is currently working on branding and
packaging concepts for Australian companies
– while keeping an eye out for inspirational
rabbit themes in readiness for 2011.
In what could be another artistic direction
change, Dani is one of six designers who
have been invited to submit concepts for this
year’s Australia Post Christmas stamp series.
“I have lots of ideas,” she says
enthusiastically, “because I’ve always
been an outsider looking in on the western
Christmas tradition.”
It has been a creative and inspiring
journey for a girl who left home for another
country carrying the heavy weight of family
misgivings on her shoulders.
Her parents considered art a poor career
choice, particularly given the financial
commitment they were making towards her
study. Dani’s response was to work doubly
hard, 9am to 9pm six days a week. “Study
and Swinburne became my life because
I didn’t want to let my parents down,”
she recalls.
Dani also believed that no matter how
artistically gifted she might prove to be, an
employer wants output … not realising then
that she would become her own boss and
master of her own artistic destiny.
She graduated with an honours degree
in graphic design in 1998 and recalls her
Swinburne years as a time to be free to “go a
little crazy” to broaden and hone her creativity.
“The main thing I learnt during my
studies – and probably the most important –
is about concepts. How to develop a concept
quickly,” she says.
“In the commercial world you don’t have
time for working through an idea in your
head and perfecting it. That is the difference
between, say, a junior designer and an art
director. The art director has a concept
straight away while the junior designer is
still refining their skills.”
To broaden herself as an artist Dani
continues to study, with her most recent
foray being into botanical illustration – an
exacting art that she hopes to bring into her
stamp designs.
“At Swinburne one of our units was
on screen printing and I found it quite
challenging, but now I realise it taught
me something new and showed me the
boundaries you have to work with in another
art form,” she says.
Dani is now an Australian citizen but
while waiting for her visa she worked around
the world and spent some time back in Hong
Kong working as a graphic artist.
“Everything there is geared to selling things
quickly, so it was throw-away design. I like
the fact my stamps last a long time and I feel
good knowing people see them all the time.”
Her parents, who only speak Chinese, are
also starting to understand her passion and
her achievement – particularly when Dani
sends home large Australia Post posters
issued to commemorate her work. “They are
very proud,” she says. ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
QUESTION
EVERYTHING
IN THE
SPOT.
Attend a Swinburne Postgraduate
Q&A night in the city.
Swinburne University of Technology invites anyone interested
in furthering their careers to attend the Postgraduate City
Session in the heart of Melbourne.
n Speak with academic staff
n Network with other attendees
n Attend course specific information sessions
n Refreshments available
Keynote speaker:
Where:
When:
Register your interest.
Associate Professor David Austin
Co-Director of the National e-Therapy
Centre for Anxiety Disorder
RACV Building,
L2, 501 Bourke Street, Melbourne
Wednesday 1 July, 6pm – 8.30pm
POSTGRAD
CITY SESSION
1300 ASK SWIN
swinburne.edu.au/citysession
alumni profile
19
CRICOS Provider: 00111D

swinburne JUne 2009
Digital dust-off
for history’s watch-houses
story by Julian Cribb
Digital revolution
20
One of society’s most cherished and once
unchanging of institutions, the museum, is
embarking on a vast transformation: glass
cabinets are being replaced by photons, static
displays by lively memories and experiences
from the public itself, the locked-away vaults
of knowledge by a new openness and a vivid
discourse with society.
The evolution of the very institution that
for centuries has been our window to all
other evolutions is an inventive response to
a changing audience; an audience that needs
new stimuli to satiate a human thirst that has
not diminished – curiosity.
“Curiosity drives the museum: it is
why we created them,” says Swinburne
University of Technology’s Associate
Professor Angelina Russo of the Faculty of
Design, who is examining how the digital
revolution is sweeping a new freshness and
meaning into bricks-and-mortar institutions
with a somewhat dusty public image.
“Curiosity drives their audiences; drives our
need to find out about who we are and about
the world we inhabit,” she says.
However, the museum audience is
changing. The ways people engage with
the museum and what they expect of it
are changing, quite radically, thanks to the
new social media. Digital technology has
heightened people’s expectations of engaging
with other people; of a two-way flow of
ideas, images and knowledge; of being able
to gain immediate access to the information
they want.
,,
Museums
are no longer
only about
exhibitions and
entertainment.
They are both
the memory
and the
conscience of
society, actively
participating in
and informing
the public
discourse on
where we are
going.”
Associate
Professor
Angelina Russo
These expectations of the digital
generation are now reshaping the museum
in ways as radical in the 21st century as
were museums’ origins as a public display of
previously inaccessible scientific knowledge
in the 19th century. But they go further still.
“Humanity faces enormous challenges
– the climate, water, energy, food security –
and people are looking for answers to these
challenges,” Associate Professor Russo says.
“Museums are trusted institutions for the
imparting of knowledge, often historical
but increasingly about our present and our
future, and the great issues that concern us.
They are no longer only about exhibitions
and entertainment. They are both the
memory and the conscience of society,
actively participating in and informing the
public discourse on where we are going.”
Associate Professor Russo’s research at
Swinburne is exploring how four museums
– the Melbourne Museum, the Powerhouse
Museum, the Australian Museum and the
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of
the Smithsonian Institution – are meeting the
challenges of the digital age, and how they
are using the new social media to learn and
network as well to share and teach.
The social media, she adds, are a good
deal more than merely social. “People are
using them to get new knowledge, make new
contacts, share professional information and
expertise, engage in interesting discussions,
post forthcoming events and debate future
practices with many, many participants.”
illustration: sonia Kretschmar
As a result, she says, museums are having
to emerge from the ‘glass case’ era. “To
remain relevant these great institutions have
realised they have to change, to acknowledge
that their audiences have changed
fundamentally in what they expect and how
they are relating to other people and groups
through social media.”
Increasingly she predicts that museum
‘exhibits’ will consist of photons in
cyberspace rather than specimens on fixed
display. They will be living, with museums
presenting their science and the public
contributing its own knowledge and views.
“You can see this happening right now
on Flickr’s ‘The Commons’ project, where
people upload a historical image and
others, from all over the place, add their
understanding or special knowledge to build
a much more detailed and interesting story.
Museums can contribute to this process
by sharing the treasures hidden in their
collections and archives – and input from
the audience can make the display vibrant,
interactive, much richer and more dynamic
even than the best exhibit.”
Museum workers too are networking
online and around the world to share ideas
on how to get the best from the digital age,
she adds (see http://museum30.ning.com).
How museums do their business may, at
first glance, seem of lesser significance when
contrasted with the weighty issues of the day.
However, museums are also the guardians
and definers of a nation’s culture and
heritage and of how it sees and understands
itself, both physically and as a society; they
oversee something far more permanent
than the crisis of the moment. Increasingly,
Associate Professor Russo believes, they are
a vital birthing suite for the future, a place
where science and society come together,
whether in a monumental building or in
cyberspace.
As such, the social media are helping
to transform one of our greatest cultural
institutions and thus further transform the
society and nation that they serve. ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine

June 2009 swinburne
Will the ferryman come for
climate refugees?
story by Robin Taylor
Tufitu Lotee has experienced the terror of
huge ocean waves flooding her home. Tufitu
and her family live on the islet of Fongafale
on Funafuti atoll, the capital of Tuvalu,
midway between Hawaii and Australia. Their
house is on a 100-metre-wide strip of land
between the Pacific Ocean on one side and a
lagoon on the other.
Two years ago, in the early hours of an
April morning, giant waves crashed over a
levee bank of dead coral, flooding Tufitu’s
house, and those of her neighbours, as she
slept.
Tuvaluans fear that the wave surge
experienced that morning is just a frightening
sign of things to come as global warming
causes an inexorable rise in sea levels. The
islands of Tuvalu are flat and extremely lowlying,
only five metres above sea level at their
highest point. The nation is expected to be
one of the first to be drowned by rising seas.
In 2008 David Corlett, adjunct research
fellow in the Institute of Social Research
at Swinburne University of Technology,
spent three weeks in Tuvalu, speaking to
people – including Tufitu Lotee – about
their experiences and the possibility of being
forced to leave their homes. The visit is
recounted in his new book, Stormy Weather*,
in which he looks at climate change
through the Tuvaluans’ eyes, calling on the
international community to act on the issue
of climate change displacement.
Already, Tuvaluans are experiencing the
impact of rising sea levels on their staple
food crop, a sweet-potato-like root vegetable
known as pulaka. Families are having to
raise the pit levels where they grow pulaka
because incoming sea water is rotting the
crop’s roots.
Dr Corlett says that despite a global focus
on climate change, the issue of protecting
people directly affected by its consequences
is largely being neglected.
He says the 11,000 Tuvaluans represent
just a small part of a broader displacement
of potentially hundreds of millions of people
because of changes to the Earth’s climate.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) estimates a rise in average
sea levels of 0.18 to 0.59 metres over the
coming century. This is a conservative
forecast compared with some studies that
predict sea level rises of one metre every
20 years. This means it is not only people
living on low-lying atolls who are at risk
from rising sea levels. A sea level rise of one
metre would leave almost 120 million people
across Asia exposed.
Australia too will have its challenges.
Leader of CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation
Flagship Dr Andrew Ash says a “planned
retreat” will be the only option for some
Australian coastal communities. Of course,
Dr Corlett points out, for many Pacific Island
communities retreat is not an option.
Dr Corlett has a background in refugee
protection and while he does not like the
term ‘climate refugees’, which he says is
legally meaningless, he believes the world
needs to adopt a coordinated response to the
issue of climate change displacement.
“People fleeing environmental factors
are different from refugees in that they are
not facing persecution and normally do not
cross international borders, but they are
similar to refugees in that they are ‘forcibly’
displaced,” he says.
Dr Corlett believes an international legal
agreement is needed to ensure that people
who are displaced by climate change can be
protected.
“With projections that tens or even
hundreds of millions of people will be
displaced due to climate change, the
international community needs to establish
an agreement that defines who might be
entitled to protection as a result of climaterelated
factors and what that protection
might be,” he says.
The UN Convention Relating to the Status
of Refugees defines the need for protection
from persecution but, for people displaced
by climate change, at what point are they
owed protection? When does an environment
become uninhabitable?
“These questions are complicated,”
Dr Corlett says. “An environment that may
be uninhabitable for one community may
provide material sustenance or social and
spiritual values to another.”
Dr Corlett has seen first-hand what is at
stake for people whose entire homelands
could be submerged. He argues passionately
for the international community to get
behind mitigation and adaptation strategies.
photo: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
* Stormy Weather: the
Challenge of Climate
Change and Displacement
(2008) by David Corlett is
published by University of
New South Wales Press.
Aside from trying to reduce the global
consumption of greenhouse gases, he says
the type of direct response is likely to be a
need for technical interventions, such as sea
walls, as well as building the capacity of
governments and communities to respond to
different levels of impact depending on their
particular circumstances.
While the Australian Government has
committed $150 million over three years to
help countries in the region adapt to climate
change, Dr Corlett suggests that migration
is another way for the global community
to adapt to the dislocation consequences of
climate change.
Meanwhile the Tuvaluans are trying to
adapt to rising sea levels now by replanting
mangroves to curb coastal erosion and by
establishing a marine sanctuary to protect
coral and other marine resources. Tragically,
Dr Corlett feels such efforts are likely to
ultimately be futile. ••
Contact. .
Swinburne University of Technology
1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946)
magazine@swinburne.edu.au
www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
environment
21

swinburne June 2009
A modern-day oracle on
Oceanography
22
Like gypsies read tea leaves to foresee the future, researchers can read
something of our future in the winds and waves. However, this modern soothsaying
relies on masses of information, data that Swinburne is collating to build the world’s
first complete picture of ocean wave activity By Julian Cribb
In the secret life of ocean waves are
prognostications of the human future.
For more than 30 years a squadron of polarorbiting
satellites and a vast fleet of buoys
have monitored the oceans, trying to get a fix
on the size, frequency and power of its waves
because, just as a thermometer reveals the
patient’s state of health, waves offer insights
into the Earth’s climatic temperament.
A deep knowledge of waves can tell
us how to design safer, stronger, more
efficient marine structures – or it may reveal
aspects of how our world is changing,
indecipherable by any other means, says the
Vice-Chancellor of Swinburne University of
Technology, Professor Ian Young.
Like the augurs of old, Professor Young
hopes we can read something of our future
in the winds and waves by amassing and
analysing all the available data collected on
them over a generation. With the help of an
Australian Research Council Linkage Grant
and in partnership with Perth-based company
RPS MetOcean, he is attempting to assemble
the world’s first complete picture of ocean
wave activity.
“In the sizes of waves you can see the
fingerprints of the El Niño that is causing
the present huge drought in south-eastern
Australia,” Professor Young explains. “You
can see how the low pressure systems
change latitude.”
The size, frequency and location of
waves – great and small – are another way
to study how the Earth’s atmosphere and
oceans interact; a way to discern on a global
scale how vigorously they work together as
the planet warms, like a pot of water being
heated on a stove.
The task is gargantuan. Seven US and
European satellites have each been recording
the height of the waves passing in a swathe
beneath their radar altimeters every second
of the day for more than quarter of a century.
From 200 kilometres or more in space they
can estimate the height of a wave within 40
to 50 millimetres, and from this much can be
deduced about the winds, weather systems,
currents and other conditions that produced
it. Together they have generated a massive
12 terabytes of information.
However, each of the satellites has
a slightly different instrument and their
data have been collected and stored using
different programs.
The data from each must be laboriously
compared with the others and ground-truthed
for accuracy against a fleet of wave-riding
buoys. Then they must be harmonised into
a single set that scientists and engineers can
interrogate to find out what is afoot with the
world’s waves.
“Waves have a great advantage over
other indicators of the planet’s condition,
such as temperature or wind speed,”
Professor Young says. “These vary widely
and rapidly, so when you look at them you
inevitably get a lot of ‘noise’, which makes
it hard to interpret what is going on. Waves
smooth all that out. They enable us to read
the average wind speed at the sea surface
from space over a longish period of time,
without recording all the gusts. This tells
us a lot more about the overall conditions
that produced the waves. We’ll be able to
see more subtle changes that may have
previously been masked by the amount of
noise in the measurements.
“If, for instance, the winds are changing as
a result of global warming, these changes will
be reflected in the waves that they generate.
We can also look at changes in the extremes.”
Though each satellite monitors only
a narrow swathe of ocean as it passes
overhead, eventually, as the Earth rotates,
these swathes cover the entire planet and a
detailed global picture of wind and wave
conditions over years can be assembled,
he explains.
Besides helping to identify global
changes before they come on us unawares,
Swinburne’s work has a supremely practical
application: a better knowledge of wave
heights – and hence of the frequencies of
severe storms – can be used to design safer
ships, offshore platforms, harbours, jetties

June 2009 swinburne
Oceanography
23
Hs (m) January
6
Hs (m) August
6
60
60
40
5
40
5
20
4
20
4
0
3
0
3
−20
2
−20
2
−40
1
−40
1
−60
−60
50 100 150 200 250 300 350
0
50 100 150 200 250 300 350
0
and other marine structures.
“To design a platform you need to
know the typical wave height in a one-in-
100-year storm, so the top of the platform
will be above the waves. Every extra
metre you don’t need to build can save
you $10 million,” Professor Young says.
Likewise marine architects can study
the conditions along the sea routes their
new vessels will sail based on decades
of information, and shape the design
accordingly. Planners of coastal cities and
ports can better adapt their seafront to the
extremes expected under climate change.
Industry partner RPS MetOcean hopes
to obtain precise information about ocean
conditions in specific locations out of the
new dataset to improve the design quality
and efficiency of their projects.
“As physical oceanographic consultants
working mainly with the offshore oil and
gas industry, our job is to quantify the
marine environment their structures are
likely to have to withstand over the coming
50 to 60 years,” explains MetOcean’s Steve
Buchan. “We need to be able to predict the
future wave climate in particular, because
waves are usually the greatest determinant of
the survival of offshore structures, typically
exerting more force than winds or currents.”
Optimising the design of these steel
leviathans requires a deep insight into likely
wave conditions now and in the future. For
the first time, the Swinburne project offers
The average wave
height around the
world (Hs), measured
in metres, during the
month of January (left)
and August (right),
obtained from the
satellite database.
The colour bar to the
right shows the scale
from 0 to 6 metres.
Note the high waves
in the North Atlantic
and North Pacific
during the northern
hemisphere winter
(January). The Southern
Ocean is rough all year,
with the maximum
waves occurring in the
southern hemisphere
winter (August).
that information planet-wide, Mr Buchan
says. “We will use the data to improve
and calibrate the models we use to predict
ocean conditions so platform developers can
design to a less than one-in-10,000 chance of
structural failure.”
RPS MetOcean is one of a handful
of companies worldwide with this sort
of capability, and early access to the
consolidated global wave data will give
Australia a clear competitive edge in the
field, he adds. ••
Contact. .w
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Blast furnace key to earth’s birth P11
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