Light touch: Award for structural innovation Thursday, 15 June 2017

An innovation in lightweight high-performance structures has earned RMIT University Professor Mike Xie the prestigious 2017 Clunies Ross Innovation Award.

Professor Xie is Director of RMIT's Centre for Innovative Structures and Materials. He developed simple but versatile techniques for finding structurally efficient and aesthetically pleasing designs, used for many landmark buildings and other novel products around the world.

His techniques include Evolutionary Structural Optimisation (ESO) and Bidirectional Evolutionary Structural Optimisation (BESO) and have made it possible to quickly obtain many of the amazing forms originally designed by the architect Antoni Gaudi for the iconic Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona.

They can significantly reduce the weight and associated energy consumption of motor vehicles and aircraft as well as enable strikingly elegant bridge and building designs and have found application across engineering, architecture, biomedicine and materials science.

Major companies in Australia including Arup, Boeing and Thales have collaborated with Xie to design light-weight and high-performance structures and materials using his techniques.

Since the inception of ESO/BESO in the early 1990s, Professor Xie has worked tirelessly on the continuous improvement and practical applications of the technique.

I’m passionate about two things – one is solving complex problems with simple approaches and the other is doing research that is practically useful,” he said.

The Clunies Ross Knowledge Commercialisation Award was won by Darryn Smart from the Cyber & Electronic Warfare Division at the Defence Science & Technology (DST) Group.

He has developed novel units to counter improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and protect Australian Defence Force soldiers and vehicles as well as those of coalition partners from radio-activated IEDs. He and his team at the DST Group in South Australia have designed, developed and produced four unique and highly advanced systems that have been commercialised with an estimated benefit of $64 million.

The Clunies Ross Entrepreneur of the Year Award went to Professor Andrew Wilks, co-Founder and Executive Chairman of SYNthesis. His fundamental research on new cell-signaling enzymes, and the resulting new therapeutic drugs he and his team have developed, promise to continue to profoundly impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide.

[Clunies Ross Innovation Award winner Mike Xie. Photo: David Hase]