Developments

Structural bearings deliver extreme low-friction performance to resources projects

Custom-fabricated structural bearings are being introduced by Hercules Engineering for extremely high stress applications in resources projects requiring outstanding load-bearing performance, even in compact or wet spaces in mineral processing applications, power generation, ports loaders and land and marine exploration and structures . The latest Herculon structural bearings are manufactured by integrating H-Glide fibre-reinforced composite pads sliding on 2B finish stainless steel to achieve an exceptionally low sliding coefficient of friction compared with other engineering bearing materials, even under water. Unlike metal bearings that may rust or require continual lubrication and maintenance, the environmentally safe yet hard-wearing H-Glide bearing pads are dry sliding and will not release contaminants into surrounding environments or adjacent processes. H-Glide’s excellent sliding properties (including friction coefficients from 0.05 – 0.1) are invaluable to infrastructure developers, engineers, architects and specifiers because lower coefficients of friction will transfer less stress onto the load-bearing structural components when the bearing does its job of protecting them against surrounding movement. Hercules Engineering and Cut To Size Plastics provide a wealth of experience and application guidance, based on almost 50 years of operation in Australasian and Asia-Pacific regions in applying engineering polymer technology to construction, infrastructure, energy, mining, manufacturing, maritime, oil and gas, food and beverage, safety and water and wastewater applications. Hercules Engineering’s latest example of bearings incorporating H-glide was in an extensive roof which required extreme load-bearing capacity in a confined space, as close as possible to the axis of the load. The same high performance is equally useful in major energy and resources structures, including wharves, platforms and steel structures, where compact bearings must withstand long-term stresses to protect valuable structures with optimum levels of safety for those within or around them. With their incompressible H-Glide sliding layer, these bearings can withstand extreme point pressures of 350-500 megapascals, depending […]

Why choose local manufacturing?

The case for local manufacturing has never been stronger. While some SMEs do, of course, benefit from regular contracts outside of their own back yard, for many the income from local trade is what keeps them afloat. This holds as true for B2B as it does for B2C. In fact, for small and medium sized businesses, choosing local manufacturing options, while perhaps a little more expensive in the short term, brings about many advantages. The case for staying local The Australian manufacturing industry is experiencing its biggest shake-up in decades. After years of languishing in the doldrums, the government has finally put in place many financial incentives and grants to allow SMEs to innovate and expand. The needs of Aussie organisations are somewhat unique. This is in part due to the geographical location, but also because of the proximity and ease of cheap imports from nations, such as China. Local manufacturing can rarely, if ever, compete on price with commodities from outside the country. However, cost alone shouldn’t be the driving factor. Choosing a local manufacturer for your needs comes with multiple advantages: Better understanding between manufacturer and customer: This is crucial to ensure that the product is as you expect. Being local and able to meet up in person and throughout any process is hugely valuable – something that can’t be done if your items are being produced thousands of miles away No shipping or customs barriers: Local companies can usually turnaround orders in a far more timely manner than those that are shipped in from another country/continent The personal touch: Face to face conversations lead to better communication. It also enables easy tracking of orders or chasing up should any issues arise The strict adherence to national and international standards: When it comes to health and safety, it’s […]

Going public helps Mayfield bring manufacturing home

The 84-year-old company has listed on the Australian stock exchange as part of a bid to boost its manufacturing in South Australia and grow its business. Electrical manufacturing business Mayfield Group Investments completed the back-door listing on Wednesday with the reverse takeover of ASX-listed Stream Group. The new entity, known as Mayfield Group Holdings (MYG), listed at an initial public offering (IPO) price of $0.36 on Wednesday and by the close of business yesterday the share price had risen to $0.60 with a market cap of $50.84 million. Headquartered in Edinburgh north of Adelaide, Mayfield also has offices and manufacturing facilities in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and some 200 staff. The company was founded in Adelaide in 1936 as FR Mayfield and provides a suite of electrical products and services for renewables, transmission and industrial infrastructure for a number of sectors including defence, mining and oil and gas. Its products include high voltage electrical switch rooms for power distribution and control for renewables (wind and solar), mining, heavy industry and utilities. While the IPO only set out to and successfully raised $1.2 million, Mayfield CEO and managing director Jon Hobbs said the listing would enable a significant growth phase to begin. “We have a growth mindset and certainly we have targets but the first step for us was to list and be able to access equity markets,” he told InDaily. “I would call us a conservative company with high aspirations, so for us it was about achieving a public listing, doing this very responsibly and with good governance and then preparing ourselves to take the next strategic step when we would come back to the market. “We are pleased that the market sees the value in our business purpose and in the trends we see in the market but equally […]

Achieving carbon neutrality: One company’s lessons learned

– Eric Rondolat, CEO, Signify Committing to carbon neutrality can trigger wide-ranging changes in how any company operates. Lessons learned from Signify can help any company understand the challenges and opportunities ahead when tackling emissions. Signify, formerly the lighting business of Philips, achieved carbon neutrality last September, delivering on a promise forged at COP21 in 2015. During the decade, the company also reduced its CO2 emissions by 70%. Achieving carbon neutrality is not for the faint of heart and it’s all the more taxing if you have a multi-national presence, with a global manufacturing footprint and supply chain. We benefited from an early start, having recognized the need to check our emissions earlier in the decade. Still, we learned a lot on our path to carbon neutrality that can help others and speed their efforts. What follows are some nuggets of advice, hard-earned through experience. 1. Embrace systems change First off, success on emissions reductions is dependent on making it core to your strategy. This means drafting business goals that align with and can be accomplished through efforts to reduce emissions. Other steps are also key, including establishing science-based targets, dissecting every aspect of your operations to save energy and emissions, and investing in measurable, worthy projects that offset unavoidable carbon emissions. From the outset it’s important to involve teams from supply chain management, manufacturing, business travel, human resources, energy procurement and real estate, as decisions made by them will directly impact your carbon footprint. Leave no stone unturned. We broke down and reviewed energy use across all our operations. Then we set about transitioning to energy efficient technologies in our offices, manufacturing, and logistical sites. Naturally, installing our own energy efficient LED lighting was a no-brainer. But significant investment was made in energy efficient manufacturing technologies and more efficient HVAC […]

Why it pays to join the circular economy

We all know that the current linear economic model is not sustainable. Materials are extracted, manufactured into products and then discarded into landfill – it’s a system that wastes valuable resources, causes environmental damage and will make it near impossible to satisfy the demands of the 3 billion new consumers in developing nations, who are expected to join the middle class by 2030. The concept of the circular economy is about decoupling growth from resource consumption – and maximising the positive environmental, economic and social effects. It’s about designing products so that they are easier to reuse or recycle, like Timberland’s Earthkeeper shoes. It’s about making sure that every product ingredient is biodegradable or fully recyclable, like the chemicals company that has replaced fossil-fuel feedstocks in their production methods. It’s about maximising useful product life by repairing or remanufacturing, like Caterpillar’s parts-refurbishing programme. The circular economy is about new business models that have shifted from selling products to selling services, such as the tyre company that offers a per-km tyre-leasing service. It is about eliminating waste from production, and making sure any waste is recovered as a valuable resource, whether it’s heat, slurry, nutrients, organic material, metal, salt – whatever. It’s about engaging your customers throughout the life cycle of the product, instead of the few minutes during which they make a purchase; and, ultimately, it’s about gaining competitive advantage. The scale of the competitive advantage is startling. Against a backdrop of resource prices that have more than doubled over the past 10-12 years, erasing the commodity-price decline of the 20th century, our material-saving potential is expected to reach around $1 trillion per year by 2025. The opportunity presented by the circular economy in Europe and the US pales into insignificance compared with what is at stake in developing nations, […]

An environmentally friendly alternative for polystyrene

While it is used all over the world as a light packaging and insulation material, EPS (expanded polystyrene) is a problem as waste. This is why VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is developing an affordable and environmentally friendly alternative for polystyrene from PLA bioplastic, which is derived from organic sources. The annual production volume of EPS is 5–6 million tonnes per year. Usually this non-biodegradable material ends up on waste tips or is disposed of by burning, which results in compounds that are hazardous to health. PLA (polylactide) is a bioplastic made from renewable materials with the help of lactic acid. VTT is investigating methods of foaming bioplastics to make beads that are further refined into products such as insulation sheets, using methods typical of EPS manufacturing processes. The expansion of the bioplastic by foaming is carried out with consideration for the environment, using carbon dioxide. The density and heat insulation properties of the new biomaterial are similar to those of polystyrene. VTT plans to take its development work closer to industrial processing and to proceed from laboratory work to factory testing. Therefore, in order to collaborate in this development it is now looking for partners from among companies operating in the field. PLA products similar to polystyrene already exist, but their problem is their high price. In collaboration with companies operating in the field, VTT will be looking for new and more efficient production methods to enable the manufacturing of affordable products. VTT is also developing a process for PLA based on extrusion foaming, in order to replace polystyrene in traffic and packaging applications, for example.

Safety blogs discuss machine safety

When it comes to safety, NHP understands that it takes more than just quality products and technical ‘know how’ to ensure a safe and secure working environment. Safety is a mindset, so while NHP prides itself on being an industry partner that offers expert people and quality products, we look to take it one step further by discussing the latest topics in the world of safety and share personal insights in an open forum – and that’s where the official NHP Safety Blog series ‘Think Safety, Talk Safety’ comes in. “The ‘Think Safety, Talk Safety’ series of blogs is designed to discuss various machine safety topics such as safety design, safety legislation, safety standards, risk assessment and much more,” says Craig Imrie, NHP’s Safety Technology Specialist, FS Eng (TUV Rheinland). “Rather than one way traffic, this instead gives those involved in the machine safety industry an opportunity to share their opinions and perspectives as well as receive expert commentary”. Some of the topics include: – What did Australian Standards get wrong with AS/NZS 4024.1:2014? – New series provides guidance on Common Cause Failure (CCF) – Safety Systems Must Be Designed For Productivity – What’s the hold-up with the new Conveyor Safety Standards? www.nhp.com.au

Million kilometres daily

Picture: The Iveco Daily range of van, single-cab and dual-cab tray truck models. The award-winning design of the Iveco Daily light commercial road vehicle meets the challenges of operations in a variety of urban and rural areas across the globe, including Australia’s harsh climatic extremes and physical road conditions. As a consequence, more than two million vehicles from the Daily range have been sold worldwide. Built on a solid steel truck chassis, the Daily has a Gross Vehicle Mass (GVM) range from 3.8 to 7 tonnes, allowing it to carry a payload of up to 4.7 tonne. Standard configurations are Single or Dual-Cab chassis, tray-truck or van. An optional design that can be ordered is a 17-seat minibus. The durability of the design is shown by the fact that some Daily minibuses in South Africa have travelled more than one million kilometres. For the South African minibuses, a typical morning starts with a departure from Soweto at 6:00 a.m. with the vehicle’s first stop at 6:45 a.m. on the outskirts of Johannesburg, where it takes on passengers going to Namibia. Picture: The instrument console of the Iveco Daily minibus showing the odometer reading 1,000,000 Kms. From the city, the Daily proceeds onto difficult terrain, including stretches of desert and savannah filled with wild animals and fords to cross–with the vehicle’s odometer gradually inching higher. A journey of 1,000 kilometres, 365 days a year means this incredible milestone was achieved in just three years. Thirteen customers in South Africa have reported to Iveco that they have reached this same milestone figure: a number that is more than twice the distance between the Earth and the Moon (almost 400,000 kilometres) and 25 times around the Earth’s 40,000 kilometre circumference. Strength, reliability, and endurance have always been the hallmarks of Iveco vehicles: qualities that have […]

Beyond Great

–Arindam Bhattacharya, Nikolaus Lang, Jim Hemerling Great is no longer good enough. Beyond Great delivers a powerful new playbook of 9 core strategies to thrive in a post-COVID world where all the rules of the game are being re-written. Beyond Great answers to two fundamental questions which face business leaders today in a world shaped by daunting and disruptive technological, economic, and social change. First, what is outstanding performance in this new volatile era? Second, how do we build competitive advantage in a world with new and often uncertain rules? Supported by years of research and hands-on consulting practice, this book presents a comprehensive framework for building a high performing, resilient, adaptive, and socially responsible global company. The book begins by taking an incisive look at these disruptive forces transforming globalization, including economic nationalism; the boom in data flows and digital commerce; the rise of China; heightened public concerns about capitalism and the environment; and the emergence of borderless communities of digitally connected consumers. Distilled from the study of hundreds of companies and interviews with dozens of business leaders, the authors have distilled nine core strategies – the new winning playbook of the 21st century. Beyond Great argues that business leaders today must lead with a new kind of openness, flexibility and light-footedness, constantly layering in new strategies and operational norms atop existing ones to allow for “always-on” transformation. Leaders must master a whole new set of rules about what it takes to be “global,” becoming shapeshifters adept at handling contradiction, multiplicity, and nuance. This book will show them how.

Victorian construction industry utilising first Australian Bluetooth contact tracing solution

The Victorian construction industry is forging ahead on the road to recovery and taking advantage of the latest Bluetooth contact tracing technology, becoming the leaders in Australian safety. Despite a year of constant setbacks, The Commonwealth and Victorian governments have committed to supporting construction jobs across Victoria by jointly investing an additional $525 million to deliver infrastructure projects and urgent road safety upgrades. Within the past three months, Major Roads Projects Victoria (MRPV) and their construction partners Decmil, Fulton Hogan Industries Pty Ltd, John Holland Group Pty Ltd, McConnell Dowell Constructors (Aust) Pty Ltd, Multiplex Constructions Pty Ltd and Seymour Whyte Constructions Pty have all implemented a new contract tracing system as part of a rigorous COVID safe plan across their sites to keep these critical projects on track and Victorians in work. Over 8,700 Contact Harald cards have been distributed across these worksites, with more to follow. Contact Harald is a wearable contact tracing card that is given to all on site visitors including workers. The technology then records and stores interactions that last over two minutes and within a 1.5 metre radius. If a visitor declares symptoms or tests positive for COVID-19, only the recorded users in close proximity to the suspected or confirmed case will be sent an SMS and email via the secure Contact Harald database, owned and administered by the construction company – removing the need for external agencies and nullifying cyber security concerns. In the event of a suspected or confirmed case, this new contact tracing system will notify only those with recorded close contact – this advancement enables construction to continue with minimal disruption. Director of Health and Product at Contact Harald Elissa Reid, said: “Now is the time for key infrastructure to take shape as we ease back into day to day […]

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