Six QUT research projects as diverse as healthier food for senior Australians and hydrogen fuel-cell, electric-powered aircraft have been successful in round three of the National Industry PhD Program.
The program supports PhD candidates to undertake industry-focused research projects and be equipped with the knowledge and skills to better translate university research into commercial products and services.
(Image, from top left:Professor Schroeter, Professor Jolieke van der Pols, Associate Professor Jonathan Bunker; bottom left: Associate Professor Dimitri Perrin, Associate Professor David Holmes.)
The projects are:
Associate Professor Jonathan Bunker, from QUT's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will supervise a PhD researchers from engineering company Hartecs Group Pty Ltd for the project Reimagining Australian CBD travel in a post-pandemic world.
Professor Bunker said the project would investigate sustained change in Australian CBD commuter travel patterns after the Covid-19 pandemic.
"We will explore new ways of working, and provide evidence-based recommendations for better planning, policy, investment and management of transport and land use infrastructure," Professor Bunker said.
"CBD commute travel patterns underpin significant government investment in transport infrastructure directed at reducing commuter congestion.
"Additionally, there is significant public and private land use investment in CBDs. As these activities create long-term commitments there is serious risk that they could create stretched or stranded assets.
"The project's outcomes will fill knowledge gaps about CBD commuters and new ways of working through literature review, modelling and evaluating travel patterns using a Brisbane case study."
Associate Professor David Holmes from QUT's School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering will supervise a PhD research candidate from industry partner Stralis Aircraft under the third round of the National Industry PhD Program.
The PhD project, Greening the aviation industry: novel approaches to hydrogen fuel-cell technology, aims to develop hydrogen fuel-cells to harness a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen produce electricity.
Professor Holmes said aviation produced about 1 billion tons of CO2 per year, which is 2.4 per cent of total global CO2 emissions.
"The development of green, sustainable technologies to power aircraft is critical if we are to meaningfully reduce our impact on the planet," Professor Holmes said.
"Stralis Aircraft is designing Australia's first hydrogen fuel-cell electric powered aircraft to decarbonise air travel and advance society's move to a clean energy future.
"This project aims to work with Stralis to develop a greater understanding of how the thermal management and cooling systems that are critical to the function of hydrogen fuel-cell technologies can most optimally be designed to meet the rigorous weight, power, and safety requirements of aircraft propulsion.
"Using numerical and experimental approaches, this project will evaluate the optimal configuration of conventional heat exchange methods within the fuel-cell cooling loop.
"We will also evaluate novel alternatives to cooling and energy recovery, to advance the viability of hydrogen technologies for clean air travel."
Associate Professor Dimitri Perrin, from QUT's School of Computer Science, will supervise the PhD project, Leveraging AI and smart bed technology to improve patient mobility, in collaboration with medical technology company Stryker.
Professor Perrin said patient mobility was an important factor during hospitalisation, associated with the development of pressure injuries and risk of falls.
"Extreme movement patterns, whether uncontrolled movement or complete lack of mobility, are known contributors to a range of poor health outcomes," Professor Perrin said.
"As it is generally difficult to monitor patient movements in real time, this project will use smart beds equipped with pressure sensors and powerful machine learning methods to accurately assess patient movements.
"We aim to develop ways to retrieve and store high-resolution pressure sensor data from smart beds and use this data to make machine-learning models of patient movement.
"The tools we develop will be scalable to entire hospital wards and have the potential to transform patient care."
Professor Ronald Schroeter, a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Future Mobility will supervise PhD researchers Lewis Cockram and Yueteng Yu on two projects with industry partner Seeing Machines.
The project Improving the safety of self-driving vehicles in Australia aims to design and evaluate novel human-machine interface (HMI) systems that improve situation awareness and driver readiness to take over control in automated vehicles (AVs).
"This project will address a key human factor in automated driving that hinders AVs' safe introduction and adoption for a transport industry that is challenged by driver shortages, rising costs, and the need for quicker deliveries.
"The regional road network is essential for goods transport, make up 82 per cent of Australian roads, and carries a disproportionally higher fatality rate which contributes significantly to the annual $27 billion in road crash costs.
"AVs could improve safety and efficiency through partial automation and collaborative human-machine driving which is why we need effective HMIs to seamlessly integrate human drivers with these automated driving systems."
The second project, Improving the safety of automated vehicles in regional Australia by reducing fatigue, aims to design a naturalistic, conversational agent (NCA) to reduce passive fatigue and improve safety-critical performance for future truck drivers using automated vehicles.
"Fatigue remains a leading contributing factor to road transportation crashes and could be managed through vehicle automation but passive fatigue or driver disengagement must be addressed before automated trucking can safely be adopted," Professor Schroeter said.
"A multi-disciplinary team from QUT and Seeing Machines will use Seeing Machines' state-of-the-art driver monitoring system (DMS) to deliver an innovative technological system incorporating advanced artificial intelligence to boost the nation's domestic freight capacity and improve road safety for all regional Australians."
Professor Jolieke van der Pols from QUT's School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences will supervise a PhD researcher who will be partly based at the Sanitarium Health Food Company working on the project, Creating healthier food products for older Australians.
Professor van der Pols said the new National Dietary Guidelines will formulate food intake recommendations for ageing adults.
"This provides an important opportunity for Australia's food and beverage sector to optimise product formulations that meet the needs of ageing Australians," Professor van der Pols said.
"Loss of muscle function is a common characteristic of ageing that is influenced by dietary micronutrients and macronutrients and negatively impacts on quality of life for older Australians.
"Food fortification is a key mechanism by which muscle health can be supported for people who may not have sufficient intake of essential nutrients".
"This project will assess the most recent evidence on specific nutrients that have been shown to improve muscle function in ageing adults, and will evaluate these nutrients in new research, to support development of Sanitarium Health Food products."
