Research

Largest 3D Metal Printing in the Southern Hemisphere – Changing the way we manufacture

Australian Advanced Materials Manufacturing (AAMM) opened the most advanced commercially available metal 3D printing facility in 2018.

The facility is located in Edinburgh Park and is connected to GigCity ultra-fast internet. It forms part of the Additive Manufacturing Applied Research Network (AMARN) and is able to 3D print various metals including titanium, stainless steel and aluminium into complex metal parts. The University of Adelaide’s Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) and the Optofab Australian National Fabrication Facility, together with the Stretton Centre and CSIRO’s Lab 22 additive manufacturing centre, established the AMARN. At present, it is the only metal additive manufacturing centre in Australia that is available to industry on a commercial basis. It provides access to technology that enables local manufacturers to remove significant costs and barriers from their operational processes. IPAS utilises advance manufacturing to build prototyping measurement devices using 3D metal printing. With investment from the State Government, IPAS is currently taking 25 photonics, defence and mining companies through a learning journey of this process. The opportunity of access to the 3D metal printer is that it allows shared use – many businesses, even those as large as BAE for example, do not have enough demand to justify their own metal printers so this offers an opportunity to increase the capacity for the printers’ use while also allowing other businesses to benefit. IPAS acts as a repository for the shared information around additive manufacturing and the benefits of building up with horizontal layering while also sharing the build plate across different organisational needs. IPAS is focused on collaboration with other businesses because they want other businesses to adopt the technology and this makes it easier for others to get onboard.

As a SABRENet customer, The Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) at the University of Adelaide fosters excellence in research in materials science, chemistry, biology and physics by developing disruptive new tools for measurement.

IPAS was created to bring together experimental physicists, chemists, material scientists, biologists, experimentally driven theoretical scientists and medical researchers to create new sensing and measurement technologies based at the University of Adelaide’s North Terrace Campus. IPAS supports leading-edge research across six themes: Defence Technologies, Medical Diagnostics and Devices, Mining and Mineral Processing, Extreme Astronomy, Environmental and Agricultural Monitoring, and Food and Beverage Analysis.

Timing precision is critical in many sensing, communication and computational tasks. The call for very high timing precision reaches its pinnacle in areas like radar technology, quantum computing and radio astronomy. IPAS researchers developed the Cryogenic Sapphire Oscillator (CSO)  or “Sapphire Clock” that produces extremely low noise microwave and radio frequency signals. It is the most precise clock in the world, with performance at least one thousand times better than any commercially available technology.

The Sapphire Clock team won the 2018 Defence Science and Technology Eureka Prize and has strong links with the defence industry in South Australia. As part of a program to develop the CSO for over the horizon radar, researchers at IPAS have access to SABRENet dark fibre to investigate the distribution of signals from the CSO over long distances while maintaining the incredibly low noise.

Photonic distribution over optical fibre has several clear advantages, and thanks to SABRENet there is access to a loop of dark fibre 60 km long, that runs from the IPAS labs at the University of Adelaide’s North Terrace Campus to DSTG in Edinburgh and back. It’s the ideal platform to test distribution techniques in a real-world environment, and experiments are underway to show that the signals from the CSO can be shared with remotes sites with little or no degradation in performance.