Australians’ perception of local manufacturing is growing steadily through the years as the critical industry becomes a vital factor in the country’s economy and the nation’s efforts to achieve environmental goals. 

Local production also makes it possible for businesses to significantly cut shipping costs, complete the manufacturing-to-shelving process in no time, and ultimately nurture these factors into a competitive advantage in the marketplace. 

More and more Australian companies are turning to local manufacturing and are breaking the mould in an era largely dominated by offshore manufacturing. One of them is Legrand Australia, a global specialist in products and systems for electrical installations and digital building infrastructure. 

Legrand is tapping into its local network’s capability in order to stay agile, flexible and responsive while also ensuring that they are designing products and solutions suited to the ANZ market. 

Building a competitive advantage

Legrand Australia touts a dedicated research and development team and an accredited NATA laboratory onsite, which conducts compliance and quality tests on more than 15,000 SKUs manufactured locally. 

In an exclusive interview with Australian Manufacturing, Legrand CEO Palash Nandy said all the company’s products comply with the required Australian, New Zealand, and International standards of manufacturing quality and electrical safety. This enables the company to design and develop products that are perfectly adapted to local needs. 

“Underpinning our local approach is a strong support network of distributors and contractors ensuring we can offer support before, during and after sale. It’s a combination of each of these factors that allows us to stand out in the marketplace,” Nandy said. 

Fostering a circular economy 

Manufacturing in markets far from where the products will hit the shelves involves additional layers of both packaging and transport, significantly affecting the company’s carbon footprint and the environment. Thus, focusing on responsible growth and manufacturing locally aids in the effort to reduce a company’s carbon footprint. 

Nandy said Legrand aims to reduce its environmental footprint by developing a circular economy that makes the company’s products, services, and supply chain more sustainable. This means sourcing locally, redesigning products, services, and packaging in a more efficient manner, reducing materials, and promoting the reuse of some materials. 

“Manufacturing locally allows us to have greater control of this process and ensure we can both produce products of high quality whilst supporting efforts to reduce our environmental footprint.” 

The advantages of being a ‘glocal’ company

The Legrand CEO also highlighted the advantages of being a ‘glocal’ company with a presence across 90 countries, tapping into the expertise of teams in each of these nations while also being flexible and responsive locally in Australia. 

“Our supply chain is very well integrated with Legrand’s global supply chain processes and planning. This allows us to visualise and predict challenges well ahead and therefore be proactive in our planning rather than being reactive.” 

Legrand has been manufacturing in Sydney, in the suburb of Preston and provides jobs for over 300 people in the country. 

Facing looming skills shortages head-on

As various local industries look at the impending threat of skills shortages, Legrand said it endeavours to foster employees across all sectors and support their development and growth. 

The company was recently listed by Forbes and Statista as one of the “World’s Best Employers” for the third consecutive year. 

“Building a sustainable, locally manufactured business that stands out will only work if it focuses on its people, which is what Legrand does.” 

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Western Australia-based company SQP Engineering has joined various industrial companies that turned to Markforged’s FX20 3D printer to produce specialised parts that would otherwise be too expensive or outright impossible to machine. 

Operating as an industrial manufacturing equipment provider specialising in machining, SQP has had to face various logistical issues and supply chain disruptions since its inception in 2006.  

Most of SQP’s business has historically been supplying precision-machined products for mining equipment, but Industry 4.0 technologies and ISO 9001 certification have enabled its expansion in the oil maritime and defence industries, according to a Markforged case study. 

The company frequently face challenges in fielding request for specialised parts, which result in lost business opportunities for the shop. 

In a specific project, SQP’s team needed to produce a wireline counter cover for mining equipment systems but was unable to manufacture the required result in the needed time frame using their existing equipment. 

After discovering that machining the part was not cost-effective and that its existing polymer 3D printer was not powerful enough to meet acceptable lead times for the project, the SQP team sought a larger and faster composite 3D printer designed to quickly and efficiently produce the required component. 

By leveraging a much more powerful 3D printer, the company also found that it can decrease the load on its CNC machines, freeing up room for the manufacturing of other valuable production parts. 

“The FX20 was a no-brainer for me. The platform, the build size, the enhanced additive manufacturing technologies — it gives me an edge above a lot of the competition,” said David Miller, owner of SQP Engineering. 

The company has now printed over 100 wireline counter covers. 

“While it was possible to print the parts with our old 3D printer, the FX20 is really what made printing viable for production, due to its speed and surface finish,” Miller said. 

Each wireline counter cover takes around 2.5 hours to print, a stark difference compared to the previous nine-hour process. 

On top of the FX20 printer purchase, SQP also brought the Markforged Metal X system in-house to round out additive capabilities. The two systems are intended to allow the company to quickly provide challenging, yet cost-effective parts, without compromising quality

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A team led by Professor Andrea Morello at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney has just exhibited the operation of a new type of quantum bit called a ‘flip-flop’ qubit, which combines the quantum properties of single atoms with easy controllability using electric signals similar to those used in standard computer chips.

Prof. Morello’s group claimed it was the first in the world to demonstrate that using the spin of an electron as well as the nuclear spin of a single phosphorus atom in silicon could be utilised as ‘qubits’ – units of information that are used to make quantum computing calculations. 

He then explained that while both qubits perform exceptionally well on their own, they require oscillating magnetic fields for their operation.

“Magnetic fields are difficult to localise at the nanometre scale, which is the typical size of the individual quantum computer components. This is why the very first proposal for a silicon quantum bit envisaged having all the qubits immersed in a uniform oscillating magnetic field, applied across the whole chip, and then using local electric fields to select which qubit gets operated,” Prof Morello explained. 

Dr Rostyslav Savytskyy, one of the lead experimental authors of the paper published in Science Advances, said the new qubit is called ‘flip-flop’ because it is built out of two spins belonging to the same atom – the electron and the nuclear spin – with the requirement that they always point in opposite directions.

“For example, if the ‘0’ state is ‘electron-down / nucleus -up’ and the ‘1’ state is ‘electron-up / nucleus-down’, changing from ‘0’ to ‘1’ means that the electron ‘flips’ up and the nucleus ‘flops’ down. Hence the name!” Dr Savytskyy further explained. 

Meanwhile, the study pointed out that a highly significant side effect comes along with the electrical control of the “flip-flop” qubit caused by displacing the electron from the nucleus.

Findings show that when two (or more) electric dipoles are placed close to one another, a strong electrical coupling develops between them that can mediate the multi-qubit quantum logic operations necessary to carry out practical quantum computations.

According to Prof Morello, the conventional method for coupling spin qubits in silicon involves putting the electrons so near to one another that they practically “touch.”

“This requires the qubits to be placed on a grid of a few 10s of nanometres in pitch. The engineering challenges in doing so are quite severe. In contrast, electric dipoles don’t need to ‘touch’ each other – they influence each other from the distance. Our theory indicates that 200 nanometres is the optimal distance for fast and high-fidelity quantum operations,” Prof Morello expounded.

The professor added that this might be a revolutionary discovery because 200 nanometers is a sufficient distance to allow the insertion of different control and readout devices in between the qubits, making the processor easier to wire up and operate.

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In a bid to achieve better part repeatability with advanced metal additive manufacturing (AM) across the globe, a network of contract manufacturers has collaborated and obtained significant results in printing the same print file of an industrial part using Velo3D Sapphire systems in six locations.

The component, which is a 3D-printed upgrade to a part originally manufactured through conventional means, such as machining and brazing, was securely sent to six manufacturing sites across three continents – four in the U.S., one in Asia and one in Europe. 

The CMs involved were Stratasys Direct Manufacturing (Austin, TX), Duncan Machine Products (Duncan, Oklahoma), Knust-Godwin (Katy, Texas), Avaco (South Korea), and Schoeller Bleckmann Oilfield Equipment (SBO, Austria). The sixth print run was performed at Velo3D headquarters in California. 

Results showed that mechanical testing and flow testing – along with destructive and non-destructive evaluation of the material coupons – demonstrates that all of the parts, both metallurgically and functionally, met IMI Critical’s design and performance specifications. 

In 2021, valve manufacturer IMI Critical and Velo3D joined hands to prove that Velo3D Sapphire printers could solve the production scalability and readiness problem that many AM platforms have struggled with. Thus, this new project was based on the very same choke valve they made that year, and its recent redesign enhances the effectiveness of IMI Critical’s proprietary Drag technology, which manages destructive fluid flow velocities through control valves. 

“This one-year wait between finalizing the new valve design, and then deciding to print more of it at different locations, simulates the kind of fear that everyone in a global manufacturing company has,” said Steve Freitas, director of new product development at IMI Critical.

Freitas added that Velo3D’s technology can print their legacy designs without having to requalify on new machines, allowing IMI to ramp production up and down as needed and to print large parts of up to 24-inch diameter with the new, larger, Sapphire XC system.

Meanwhile, Zach Walton, director of technical business development at Velo3D, pointed out that the implications of the global project with IMI Critical extend far beyond the oil and gas industry.

“Whether you are working in space, defense, power, or any other industrial environment, if you want to reproduce either an individual spare part, or a larger number of optimized, high-performance components, you may have similar future scalability problems that AM – and a worldwide network of CMs – can now successfully solve.”

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Media Release by Gekko Systems

The technical team at Gekko Systems is pleased to release further data supporting the benefits of new technology that optimises carbon management systems in gold processing facilities. Optimising carbon management in the CIL circuit reduces gold solution losses and improves gold circuit recovery. This is essential for sites needing to offset higher inflationary costs with improved revenue. 

The case study, which was released today and is now available on the Gekko website reviews the operational performance of the Carbon Scout at Evolution’s Cowal Gold Operation in New South Wales, Australia. The Carbon Scout is a self-contained, ground-level sampling system that measures carbon concentration, as well as pH, DO, and more recently has an option to measure gold loading on carbon using XRF technology on an hourly basis. 

Optimising the Carbon Scout for site conditions allows for more accurate, reliable, and repeatable measurements of the carbon inventory of the CIL circuit. Automating data collection and process actions such as carbon transfer reduces operator risk exposure and person-hours (previously dedicated to manual data collection tasks). 

Installation of the Carbon Scout at Cowal Gold commenced in February 2019. The Gekko Systems Digital Services and Technical team provided ongoing support – both onsite and remotely – in the initial months of the Carbon Scout’s operation to ensure maximum availability was achieved and Evolution Mining was receiving the full benefit of the Carbon Scout. 

After a few months of integration with the SCADA system, the Carbon Scout was able to utilise the data and analysis to facilitate the automated transfer of the carbon inventory within the circuit to maintain pre-determined concentrations.

The Carbon Scout was originally the brainchild of Curtin University’s Gold Processing team led by Dr Teresa McGrath and Bill Staunton. Curtin University selected Gekko Systems as their commercialisation partner. Bill Staunton noted that “real-time data collection instrumentation and related analysis is essential to the future of the gold processing industry.” 

Gekko Systems’ Technical Director, Sandy Gray, said “the increasing installation base of the Carbon Scout globally is providing a fantastic baseline of evidence that supports the benefits of quality data collection and automation.”

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Case Study by ARM Hub

A Queensland family-run laundry has developed a robot prototype to automate one of the most labour-intensive tasks in commercial laundries – feeding clean towels into a folding machine before they are returned to the customer.

ARM Hub CEO Associate Professor Cori Stewart said the first phase of the towel flattening project undertaken by Hervey Bay-based Consolidated Linen Services (CLS) and the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Hub in Northgate, Brisbane, demonstrated it was possible to automate picking up linen from a container and flattening it.

“This is the key task for feeding a towel or other item into a folding machine,” said Dr Stewart.

“We believe this technique and its scalability is unique in the laundry space, and there is a significant commercial opportunity.”

Each week, CLS’s mostly seasonal staff feed by hand over 300 tonnes of clean towels, sheets, and pillowcases into automated folding machines in their laundry operations.

Tom Roberts, Operations Manager of CLS, which services an area of 1200kms across regional Queensland, said staff were handling around 700,000 linen items every week.

“The feeding process is incredibly labour intensive – the item must be picked up individually from a container, held by the corners to flatten it, and then fed into the folding machine – which takes around six seconds per item.”

The work is undertaken in an environment that can reach 50 degrees Celsius and around 95 percent humidity, requiring workers to take regular hydration and rest breaks.

With funding from the Queensland Government’s Essential Goods and Supply Chain Program, CLS began working with Professor Roberts and Mr David Hedger, Head of Project Services at ARM Hub, to develop an automated solution to the towel flattening problem.

Mr Hedger said the first phase of the project aimed to demonstrate it was possible to automate flattening linen.

“We focused on towels initially, as linen is more difficult to handle,” he said.

“We observed that when a towel was hung up by a corner, the opposite corner would usually be at the lowest point.”

Two robot arms set on a benchtop equipped with LiDAR and RGB cameras were trained to recognise true, as opposed to folded, corners on the towels.

Minister for Regional Development and Manufacturing Glenn Butcher said it was good to see businesses in regional Queensland partnering with the ARM Hub.

“It’s great to see Queensland manufacturers working with the ARM Hub to learn about robotic technologies and techniques and develop industry skills and expertise to apply to their own businesses,” Mr Butcher said.

“We know the importance of the manufacturing industry to the state’s continued growth, and stories like this demonstrate that Queensland is well on its way to becoming a globally recognised in advanced manufacturing technologies.”

For Neville and Tom Roberts, the world-first robotic innovation will help the commercial laundry sector become more resilient to economic impacts from tourism and labour availability.

“David and the team at ARM Hub have been just fantastic to deal with,” Tom Roberts said.

“They’ve always had an open mind when other places said what we were trying to do could not be achieved and their willingness to come to the table and help and to throw ideas around has been fantastic.”

Tom’s father, Neville, who along with wife Morena, founded CLS 30 years ago, said with the Olympics in 2032, the hospitality industry would undertake “massive growth” in the next 10 years.

“Thirty years ago, laundry was 30 tonnes per week and now is hundreds of tonnes per week, so there is only one way we can do it, and that is automation,” Neville Roberts said.

“Ultimately we want to improve efficiency and safety throughout the laundry, while improving our business profitability at the same time.”

Deputy Premier and Minister for State Development Steven Miles congratulated Consolidated Linen Services and ARM Hub on the innovation.

“The Queensland Government is extremely proud that funding from the $50 million Essential Goods and Supply Chain Program is assisting companies to commercialise innovative technologies,” Mr Miles said.

The post AI vision for robotic laundry breakthrough appeared first on Australian Manufacturing.

Case Study by Entegra Signature Structures

Entegra Signature Structures is a national manufacturer of steel sheds and signature structures with globally patented designs that deliver exceptional quality and reliability.

Founded 35 years ago in Swan Hill Victoria, the Entegra team prides itself on its long history but remains firmly focused on the future, investing heavily in research and development to strengthen its position as a leading manufacturer and increase capability to deliver complex engineering tasks.

Laurie McCalman, General Manager at Entegra said the business has experienced strong growth over the past 3 years and invested heavily to expand and modernise manufacturing capability at its Swan Hill and Gympie facilities.

“The business has grown exponentially over the COVID-19 period which has resulted in a substantial increase in staffing levels nationally, predominately at our manufacturing sites.

“We are transitioning these manufacturing sites to a modern, digital workspace that paves the way for future growth and prepares our business for industry 4.0.”

Challenge

David Green, Head of Operations at Entegra is managing the transition to industry 4.0 across all facilities, and oversees the modernisation of the team’s welding capability.

“We are big on standardising processes and associated machinery to ensure the outcome from our facilities is predictable. Our manufacturing facilities had traditional transformer-based welding technology and we maintained common consumables amongst these machines for up to 20 years in some cases.”

Investing in new welding technology was important to Entegra as they understood the value of advanced manufacturing in operations.

“We always talked about ways to track welding time, which for us is the ultimate measure. It is about process control and having visibility across the business.

However, if we were going to replace one welder, we’d have to replace the lot – this was a big call for us.”

Achieving ISO9001 certification was a big achievement for Entegra, however the team recognises other relatively new standards such as AS/NZS 5131 for Structure Steelwork Fabrication would be increasingly important in the future and rely on new technologies.

“As we continue to grow, we know there will be opportunities in the short-term for larger projects that require compliance with this standard – and eventually over the next decade, we believe it will become the norm across all industry.”

Being located in regional Victoria, Entegra also identified the challenge of being able to find welders to support increased production, and explored welding automation as a way to upskill current staff and improve productivity.

“It isn’t that easy to find experienced people, especially when you’re a long way from metropolitan areas. Setting up the foundations for a welding robotic system that we could learn from made sense to support our future plans.”

Solution

With BOC already supplying its welding consumables, Entegra engaged BOC’s application specialists to start investigating new technology solutions and trialing various welders to replace existing equipment.

“It made sense to go down the path with BOC. We needed a supplier we were comfortable with. They had always been reliable with a good delivery model for getting product in.”

As the exclusive supplier of EWM digital welding machines in Australia, BOC worked with Entegra to replace all welding machines with EWM MIG inverter welders, set up to also use EWM’s industry-leading forceArc Process.

“We trialed the EWM machines a few times, and what interested us the most was the xNet software that could connect them all digitally, produce data and develop welding procedures.

“The buttons that can be installed at each work station to identify who is welding what, when and what their qualification is was also an attractive feature.”

While replacing its welding machines, Entegra also commissioned its first welding automation robot with BOC and Automation & Robotic Services providing a turnkey solution. The automation system included an ABB robot paired with an EWM MIG inverter welder. This was set up to weld Entegra’s Taperflow® high volume box gutter systems.

Representatives from Entegra’s team learned the basics of robotics, and management worked with EWM experts in Germany and their local IT team to design and implement the right IT infrastructure to support the welding machines.

“There were a lot of different options. We had already invested in really good server hardware so were able to set up the welding system as a virtual machine on our server. We upgraded to fibre optics to ensure a clear line, power over ether for further expansion and gigabit switches.”

Business benefits

Building skills and future workforce
Since implementing the new welding technology, Entegra’s staff have embraced the opportunity to learn about the new technology and management has invested to upskill its workforce.

“From a management point of view, the welding machines and robot are easy to use. Many different people have been using the robot and are generally not afraid of it, which has been really good.

“We see it as an investment in our people. The robot isn’t about making it faster, but rather learning as a team. To manage robots and these new welding tools, we need to ensure we are developing our industry 4.0 experience in-house.”

Entegra is currently upskilling a senior welder to get a welding supervisors qualification to help certify welding procedures, and has also employed a mechanical engineer to spearhead further design of the welding robot and set up offline programming.

Meaningful data
The xNet software has provided meaningful data for the Entegra management team that is being reported regularly at a board level.

“With this software, we are now on the pathway to industry 4.0. To me this means being able to look at data from a machine-by-machine level, and then at an overall operational level. Then using this data to make meaningful business decisions. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what we can do.

“I am able to sit at home and see what is happening in real-time. We have been reporting weld hours at a board level and identifying trends occurring in the workshop.

Quality confidence
Maintaining the standardisation that its customers have come to expect, Entegra has continued to deliver an even higher quality product.

The EWM welding machines have delivered significant benefits, especially the forceArc process that has resulted in significant time savings.

“There wouldn’t be any welder in our team that would say there hasn’t been a huge improvement. Weld quality in terms of clean up and splatter is very noticeable.”
The better process control and qualification of the welding has also set up Entegra on a path to achieve AS/NZS 5131 safety standard certification in the future.

“This has given the sales team a lot more confidence knowing that we’re using cutting edge technology, heading towards automation and investing in our people. This all translates to a better quality and more competitive product that gives us more confidence knowing we are on a path to industry leading compliance.”

Blueprint for the future
Entegra has developed welding systems and IT infrastructure to support industry 4.0 welding manufacturing facilities, which they believe will be a blueprint for the future.

“We now have a robot that we can learn from and train. As we continue to use it and analyse data, we will have a blueprint for rolling-out automation systems at any of our sites nationally.

“If we wanted to install any IoT application down the track, we now have the IT infrastructure in place to be able to do that.

“We’re proactive, we want to be leading the industry and maintain our edge as a business is known and respected for the highest quality.”

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