The Aerostructures Innovation Research Hub, aka AIR Hub, is moving the needle in aerospace research for Australia using advanced composite materials to design and produce innovative aerostructures.
Manufacturers’ Monthly sits down with AIR Hub Director Dr. Adriano Di Pietro to uncover how the AIR Hub’s collaboration between industry and research leverages state of the art facilities and expert teams to produce novel composite structures for the next generation of air mobility.
Between 1991 to 2015, Australia’s aerospace industry was supported by the Advanced Composite Structures Cooperative Research Centre (CRC-ACS), an Australian Government co-funded research platform.
In the late 2000s to early teens, Australia saw huge economic, technological and industry benefits from acquisitions such as the Army’s first dedicated armed reconnaissance helicopter, dubbed the ‘Aussie Tiger.’ Boeing’s presence in Australia also led to significant benefits, as Adriano Di Pietro, Director of AIR Hub explained.
“The resin infusion technology used on the 787 produced in Fisherman’s Bend and exported into the Boeing supply chain has led to over five billion dollars’ worth of manufacturing exports for Australia,” he said. “That technology was developed through this CRC-ACS with other industry collaboration. We needed something like that again.”
In the years after the CRC-ACS concluded in 2015, a gap in industry capability began to grow without a coordinated, industry-led applied research group focused on aerospace in Australia. According to Di Pietro, the Australian aerospace industry led the charge with the government advocating for a research industry collaboration to be set up again, and so the notion of the AIR Hub was staged.
The AIR Hub began at a critical time for aerospace, where not only had the world changed off the back of the COVID pandemic, but aerospace faced a huge adversity. With borders closed, flights grounded, workforces disbanded and production stopped, the Victorian government was searching for post-stimulus and recovery opportunities, especially in higher education, that would support critical technology industries and restart the eco-system engine, from school leavers through to industry experts and big business.
“There is a new challenge with advanced air mobility and the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS),” Di Pietro said.
“There was an acknowledgment that digitalisation would play a major role and those skillsets weren’t prevalent. There is an existing challenge today – the skills are not present in the Australian supply chain at the moment, nor are they enough across the industry for us to bid into those international opportunities.”
With industry impetus, Swinburne put together a bid to create an industry- led applied research group that would act more as an engineering team to deliver solutions, help develop skills, build expertise and translate and qualify technology and digital assets to support Australia in the next challenge
in advanced air mobility and future opportunities in civil aerospace.
A $12 million grant from the Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund (VHESIF) was key to getting the hub off the ground and it officially launched in October 2021. Building on Victoria’s history as a leader in the Australian aerospace industry, the AIR Hub aims to be a national champion to create global opportunities through its European and US relationships.
In a statement, the Victorian Government said, “led by Swinburne, the AIR Hub is bringing together the best of Victoria’s aerospace research, design and manufacturing to work with industry on real world design and manufacturing problems for the next generation of air mobility. Already, the AIR Hub is fostering new, highly skilled talent and upskilling the existing workforce to increase job opportunities in the rapidly evolving aerospace and space sectors.”
The AIR Hub brings together the research expertise of Arena 2036, ANSTO, CSIRO, Monash University, Federation University and the University of Stuttgart with Australia’s aerospace leaders, including Boeing, Cablex, Furnace, Kite Magnetics, Leidos, Marand, Memko, Quickstep, Shoal, Swoop Aero and Textron Systems Australia.
Di Pietro and his team had observed grant funding models in Germany, France and the US where industry partners had worked with organisations to bridge the gap between Low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) research and the tough road of getting the technology readiness to commercialisation.
“We have fantastic facilities here with huge testing capabilities. We bring this to industry problems, with expertise to work on the engineering challenges, bridging the gap between invention and innovation,” he said.
The AIR Hub focuses on civil, cargo and aeromedical airliners, urban electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) air vehicles, and advanced composite materials for the space and satellite industries.
Most of the AIR Hub’s team, including Di Pietro, are from industry themselves, which helps when it comes to working with local SMEs and start-ups to boost their global competitiveness.
“We see ourselves more as an engineering team and we try to approach our engagement with industry as industry-to-industry conversations,”
he explained. “We talk about projects, deliverables, timeframes, rather than talking about research.”
The AIR Hub acknowledged early on that a healthy ecosystem includes all levels in the value chain, from the small end of town to the big end. Realising a gap in access, funding and collaboration with startups and SMEs, the AIR Hub developed the AIR Pass program. The program is designed for early-stage ventures with a sense of their product- market fit potential. The program gives a place for prototyping and technology support to achieve a demo, trial or pilot program with their first or next customer.
For up to six months, the AIR Pass recipient and AIR Hub engineering team work together to rapidly design, build, test, analyse and demonstrate prototypes to customers.
Importantly, a focus is put on the customer touch point, to attract future funding and support the startup growth journey through grants or investment.
AIR Pass recipients can receive up to $150,000 in prototyping support for demonstration to early customers and up to $50,000 equity- free seed funding for non-prototyping activities to “focus on mission”, giving runway to work with the AIR Hub team to ensure success. When you consider this support is leveraged with AIR Hub’s network of suppliers and organisations, it’s unsurprising to see success stories already coming out of the program.
“Particularly in aerospace, there’s been a gap in funding support for startups that helps with that whole cash flow problem,” Di Pietro said. “We help with prototyping development work, but then we step it up another level following a successful AIR Pass and work on co- funded opportunities in joint proposals. We take a project delivery approach with industry partners which are embedded in our team so it’s a collaborative model.”
Hydrogen fuels
Clean propulsion is another stream which is integral to the AIR Hub’s work, researching and developing capacity for safe hydrogen storage on aircraft and eVTOL air vehicles. The hub recently won a $1.3 million grant from the Australian Government’s Emerging Aviation Technology Partnerships program to develop a hydrogen-powered propelled drone. According to Di Pietro, a number of different industry players are looking to provide the sovereign subcomponents for the project.
The Hydrogen to the Skies (H22S) project will design and integrate a new hydrogen propulsion system into a large-scale drone, working with Australian partners to help spearhead the commercial development of clean, zero emissions uncrewed air systems.
The first prototype is expected to be completed before the end of 2023, building on the momentum of AIR Hub’s leading work on Small Hydrogen Aircraft Development and Evolution (SHADE). SHADE is a medium-size (approx. 3.5 metre wingspan) electric-powered UAS which acts as a test bed for new hydrogen propulsion technologies.
Instead of a battery, after conversion it will be powered by a fuel cell that generates electricity from hydrogen, with water and heat the only by-products.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research Professor Karen Hapgood said H22S connects Swinburne’s research strengths in aerospace, hydrogen and sustainability to fast-track technology which has the capacity to improve the lives of millions.
“This next generation green technology will not only help decarbonise Australia’s aviation industry but will also have positive effects for our regional communities, emergency services and advanced manufacturing sector,” Professor Hapgood said.
“This funding will help grow Australia’s domestic clean aviation technology capabilities and ensure we can continue to create innovative technology for a better world.”
When asked about hydrogen propulsion, Adriano Di Pietro explained it to be a critical turning point for advanced air mobility in regional Australia because it significantly extends range and payload options, compared with pure battery electric propulsion systems. The H22S project aims to demonstrate how hydrogen propulsion can be commercially deployed, paving the way for the regulatory and operational developments needed to better connect regional communities.
Further to this, the project will have significant impacts for Australian industry, with the potential for millions of dollars in technology export revenue by the early 2030s.
“The real value we see is there are organisations internationally developing key technologies around the utilisation of hydrogen,” he began to explain.
“Australia is a leader in hydrogen production, but the users and consumers of hydrogen are at a minimum. We know that decarbonisation is going to take a number of different solutions – it’s not just about electrification, batteries and solar – there’s going to need to be a diversity in our energy supply. But in aviation, hydrogen really has a role where the energy density of batteries will be limiting.”
H22S will ultimately result in the first UAS platform that is made in Australia.
“We’ve created an opportunity to do collaborative development with industry partners in Australia, not just on hydrogen production, but on hydrogen utilisation technologies: fuel cells, inverters and batteries to integrate them in a use case.”
Advanced composites and Industry 4.0
A strength of the AIR Hub is its access to state-of-the-art facilities, including the Victorian Hydrogen Hub, which is led by Swinburne in partnership with CSIRO and Germany’s AERENA2036. As well as this facility to help drive the hydrogen economy, the Industry 4.0 Testlab for Composite Additive Manufacturing at CSIRO’s Clayton site in Melbourne’s southeast creates opportunities for researchers and industry partners to innovate using advanced composite materials.
“When we talk about aerospace, there’s plenty of elements, including software and modelling,” he said.
“We’ve decided to focus on deep tech – the hardware and platform piece – because that’s where we see a lot of the supply chain opportunity and where the industry partners in Australia sit right now. We see that composites will always play a key role in aerospace going forward, especially in advanced air mobility where you’ve got powered lift.
“Multifunctional materials and smart structure are one of our core streams of expertise and focus because we see that translation opportunity. There’s industry there with competence, capability and baseload and opportunity from a technology and product point of view.”
When Di Pietro references composites, he doesn’t mean exclusively carbon fibre. The AIR Hub is working across a variety of hybrid designs. One example is multi- functional coatings which can provide functionality for different aerospace projects. In order to feed the future manufacturing economy that Australia strives for, expertise and capability in advanced composites must continue to improve.
“For example, carbon fibre tank technology is going to be a key enabler for the entire hydrogen economy,” he said.
“At the moment, we don’t have the high- volume tank manufacturing here which could feasibly service the future hydrogen economy we’re talking about.”
The world-class Industry 4.0 Testlab provides fully digitally supported engineering and manufacturing solutions for parts, processes and entire systems.
The entire facility has a digital twin, which is used to undertake visualisation of composite manufacturing for Swinburne’s aerospace partners. The digitalisation is used for prediction, process optimisation and quality improvement and is especially useful in complex design for manufacturing (DFM) in composites.
“We’re doing a lot of work on that digitalisation stream to basically build those digital assets to do DFM for automated composite manufacturing
in the Testlab,” he said.
“An exciting project in that space for us is with Boeing Australia, leveraging their understanding and sophistication to do a lot of testing, characterisation and modelling work.”
After the conversation shifted, Di Pietro explained that the emergence of advanced air mobility means the aerospace industry has more development in both the volume and variance of models. Considering uncrewed technology, he believes an opportunity exists to walk the path of derisking for different applications.
“UAS is facilitating the certification pathway for new aerospace technology,” he said. “Traditionally aerospace has been a trickle-down industry, with a long way to go to reach applications outside of the classical civil sector. We’ve now got steps along the way and can actually work the other way around.”
For instance, AI and new material technology can be seeded into an uncrewed platform at a small scale to be tested and get feedback to eventually look for certification. The Hydrogen to the Skies project is a perfect example of that.
Testing is at the heart of the AIR Hub and is where it differentiates itself from most research and development institutes. Di Pietro explained that testing can’t start early enough in a development life cycle in order to see the realisation of that product.
“We know that testing for aerospace in particular is been something that’s been hard to get access to in the past,” he said. “We’re working as a conduit to bring experts, facilities and capability together and we’re going out and we’re flying.
“Because instrumentation is key for flight testing – which leverages a lot from industry 4.0 approaches – digitalisation is a big part of it. We’re now seeing that everything that’s being affected by Internet of Things, new comms and AI is feeding into what we can do with flight trialling.”
Opportunities for the young and bright
It’s no secret that the broader manufacturing community faces talent shortages. This is also true in advanced manufacturing, so it’s important for the AIR Hub to give the best possible chance for the next generation to succeed in Australia by exposing them to innovative platforms.
Di Pietro and the Swinburne community are changing the perception that young people need to go overseas to work in destinations like Silicon Valley for deep tech platform development projects. The AIR Hub is providing the opportunities locally to support the ‘brain regain’ as Minister Husic commented on return from his recent trip to the US.
“As an industry-focused university, we’re taking graduates as engineers on projects and they’re starting to work as professionals on industry-interested projects in aerospace,” he explained. “One thing I’ve come to appreciate in this role is that Swinburne is a huge platform of knowledge transfer management. Through our partnerships, we’re allowing our partners to have access to online and face-to-face courses, specific masterclasses, and training and development, as well as expertise.”
From an educational point of view, the AIR Hub’s deliverables aren’t research papers or reports, they’re work benches and prototypes.
“We’re actually translating fundamental research into tools and platforms that engineering design teams can utilise readily and not have to interpret a research paper in order to understand how they use it day to day.”