Page 22 - Australian Defence Magazine October 2021

22 NEWS REVIEW INDUSTRY UPDATE
OCTOBER 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
NEW SOVEREIGN INDUSTRIAL CAPABILITY PRIORITIES ANNOUNCED
MINISTER for Defence Industry Melissa Price has announced four new Sovereign Industrial Capability Priorities (Priorities) to ‘help to build a robust, resilient and in- ternationally competitive defence industry in Australia’.
The new Priorities are: Robotics, Auton- omous Systems, and Artificial Intelligence; Precision Guided Munitions, Hyperson- ic weapons, and Integrated Air and Missile Defence Systems; Space; and Information
Warfare and Cyber Capabilities.
Minister Price said the additional Pri-
orities reflected the chang- ing strategic environment outlined in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and Force Structure Plan.
“The capabilities covered
by these new Priorities are
essential to maintaining the
ADF’s combat edge,” Minister Price said.
“The new additions are also focused on providing secure, long-term employment to Australians in 21st century industries and technologies.”
ABOVE: Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Artificial Intelligence are one
of the new Sovereign Industrial Capability Priorities.
tal approaches to the overheating problem. “Fuels that can absorb heat while pow- ering an aircraft are a key focus for scien- tists, but this idea relies on heat-consuming chemical reactions that need highly efficient catalysts,” Hubesch said. “Additionally, the heat exchangers where the fuel comes in contact with the catalysts must be as small as possible, because of the tight volume and
weight constraints in hypersonic aircraft.” To make the new catalysts, the team 3D printed tiny heat exchangers made of metal alloys and coated them with synthetic min- erals known as zeolites. The researchers replicated at lab scale the extreme tempera- tures and pressures experienced by the fuel at hypersonic speeds, to test the function-
ality of their design.
When the 3D printed structures heat up,
some of the metal moves into the zeolite framework– a process crucial to the un- precedented efficiency of the new catalysts.
“Our 3D printed catalysts are like minia- ture chemical reactors and what makes them so incredibly effective is that mix of metal and synthetic minerals,” Hubesch said. “It’s an exciting new direction for catalysis, but we need more research to fully understand this process and identify the best combina- tion of metal alloys for the greatest impact.”
Thenextstepsfortheresearchteamfrom RMIT’s Centre for Advanced Materials and Industrial Chemistry (CAMIC) include op- timising the 3D printed catalysts by study- ing them with X-ray synchrotron techniques and other in-depth analysis methods.
3D PRINTED CATALYSTS TO PROPEL HYPERSONIC FLIGHT
ULTRA-EFFICIENT 3D printed catalysts could help solve the challenge of overheat- ing in hypersonic aircraft and offer a revo- lutionary solution to thermal management across countless industries.
Researchers at RMIT University say the ‘highly versatile’ catalysts are ‘cost- effective to make and simple to scale.’ The team’s lab demonstrations show the 3D printed catalysts could potentially be used to power hypersonic flight while simulta- neously cooling the system.
The research is published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal, Chemical Communications.
Lead researcher Dr Selvakannan Pe- riasamy said their work tackled one of the biggest challenges in the development of hypersonic aircraft: controlling the incred- ible heat that builds up when aircraft fly at more than five times the speed of sound.
“Our lab tests show the 3D printed cata- lysts we’ve developed have great prom- ise for fuelling the future of hypersonic flight,” Periasamy said. “They offer an ex- citing potential solution for thermal man- agement in aviation – and beyond.
“With further development, we hope this new generation of ultra-efficient 3D printed catalysts could be used to trans- form any industrial process where over- heating is an ever-present challenge.”
Only a few experimental air vehicles have reached hypersonic speed (defined as above Mach 5 – over 6,100km an hour or 1.7km per second). In theory, a hyper- sonic aircraft could travel from London to Sydney in four hours but many challenges remain in the development of hypersonic air travel, such as the extreme heat levels.
First author and PhD researcher Rox- anne Hubesch said using fuel as a coolant was one of the most promising experimen-
LEFT: A range of experimental designs for the 3D printed catalysts.
RMIT UNIVERSITY
DEFENCE