For engineers pushing the boundaries of technology, getting stakeholders on board can be an enormous challenge.
Words by Kevin Gomez
It is often said that risk is the flip side of innovation and that, without innovation, the world will not experience improved products and services, or a better quality of life.
“We tend to talk about risk as part of the mathematical formula, with the likelihood and the consequence determining the level of risk,” Geoff Hurst FIEAust CPEng, Engineering Innovation Design Strategist, told create.
An interesting way of looking at risk was put forward by former Rutgers University Professor Peter Sandman, who said that risk is the sum of hazard plus outrage. He advised project managers to ensure that all the aspects related to human wellbeing were adequately considered in a project’s design, or even at the scope definition stage.
One of the most interesting examples of community and political outrage was experienced by the late CY O’Connor, the first Engineer-in-Chief of Western Australia. Overcoming serious technical and political challenges, O’Connor was able to design and build a water supply pipeline to support the Kalgoorlie Goldfields. The project was started in 1895 and completed in 1903, a year after he died.
Among those who admire O’Connor’s tenacity and ingenuity is Professor James Trevelyan FIEAust, Emeritus Professor in the Engineering School at the University of Western Australia.
“The way O’Connor went about dealing with and selling his audacious vision is a good example for younger engineers,” Trevelyan said.
The largest water supply pipeline in the world at that time was a short 200 mm-diameter pipe from the English Lake District to the City of Manchester, and O’Connor proposed building a 700-mm pipe running over 560 km.
“To gain funding, he divided the pipeline into 10-15 sections, with each consisting of a small storage reservoir and a pumping station which would deliver water to the reservoir for the next pump,” Trevelyan said.
O’Connor’s pitch was that similar pipelines were being used in other countries for dredging operations and handling slurries of sand and water, which is much more challenging than water.
“He broke the problem down to smaller manageable chunks, and he got away with it.”
O’Connor also invented a new way of joining the pipes, as it wasn’t possible to produce complete cylindrical pipes at that time.
“The traditional process was to use rivets to join two halves and create a cylinder – but rivets protrude outside, leading to corrosion, and also protrude inside, reducing water flow in the pipe,” Trevelyan said.
He devised a locking bar to bolt the two half-cylinders together, and the flow of the water tightened the mechanism, preventing leaks. “It took him 12 months and a trip to London to get approval for his design, which was revolutionary at the time.”
Group effort
Getting innovative ideas across the line can often be challenging as these solutions are untried and untested.
The Aurecon team that designed Boola Katitjin, a mass-engineered timber (MET) building at Murdoch University, were fortunate to be working with a client who advocated innovation, but they faced obstacles that required out-of-the-box thinking. The 16,000 m²building is the largest MET building in WA, winning Project of the Year in the 2023 Engineers Australia Excellence Awards.
“Doing a timber building on that scale was a challenge, because such an MET project hadn’t been done before in WA,” said Pratik Shrestha MIEAust CPEng, Principal, Building Structures at Aurecon. “But Murdoch University was committed to this approach and wanted to use it as a vehicle for innovation. The university aspired to embed research into this project, and help change the trajectory of the construction industry via the project and research embedded into it.”
Shrestha and his team took advantage of the highly modular and prefabricated nature of MET.
“It was like putting together a flat-packed item from Ikea, just on a vastly larger scale,” Shrestha said. “Everything comes to the site prefabricated and predrilled – and all you needed to do was connect everything onsite.”
However, assembling a building of this type and size wasn’t easy.
“To enable safer and efficient construction, we came up with the idea of using robots to install screw fixings on this project.”
Constructing the building required the precise fixing of 300,000 screws 300-400 mm long. To achieve this, Aurecon teamed up with the Sydney University of Technology, which had done pioneering work in this area.
“Murdoch was a highly persistent and determined client and pushed us to innovate every step of the way. Construction sites are complex by nature and inserting a robot into this environment was challenging.”
An aspect that helped push novel solutions on the Boola Katitjin project was Murdoch University’s willingness to accept failure. According to Shrestha, the university was open to giving novel solutions a shot, and willing to learn from any failure and share their experience to benefit others.
The building’s northern event space portal frame was another area where the client pushed Shrestha and his team to innovate. “For aesthetic reasons, Murdoch did not want a series of midspan supporting columns for the 30 m-wide portal frames, although the engineering design required it.”
This design was already pushing the boundaries of what was possible from a MET design perspective and limitations imposed by Australian standards.
“The easy answer would have been to say, ‘We’ll leave the column be. It can’t be done.’ But we partnered with the University of Queensland, built a full-scale prototype of one of these connections, and conducted a destructive test to understand the behaviour of the portal frame. This prototyping gave us the required data and confidence to push the boundaries of engineering, and design a huge open space free of columns.”
Read more: Behind the scenes of an award-winning mass timber building
Use case
While active automated freight-handling vehicles on a construction site pose a challenge, working on a live site that could not be shut down is a different prospect altogether.
Patrick Terminals and NSW Ports collaborated on the Sydney AutoStrad Botany Rail Expansion (SABRE) to transform container handling. The project integrated a fully automated rail terminal with an automated container handling system, creating the world’s first fully automated container exchange and doubling the container capacity of the terminal.
“The works that we had to deliver involved thorough staging plans and management strategies to ensure that the port could remain operational while the works were underway,” said Steph Dahan MIEAust, Associate Civil Engineer at JN Consulting Engineers, who provided the civil and structural engineering solutions for SABRE.
The whole terminal is fully automated with driverless vehicles moving the containers around.
“Our challenge was to build with very tight tolerances in design and construction, else the safe operation of these vehicles is compromised.”
To add another layer of complexity, the tectonic plates on which Australia sits moved about a metre between 1994 and 2020. It is common for most projects to be designed using the Geocentric Datum of Australia GDA94 or GDA2020 coordinate systems.
“Because of the high precision required by the automated vehicles, the port adopted its own coordinate system so that everything was always on point even as the project evolved over multiple years,” Dahan said.
Given that space is at a premium at the terminal, the client requested the container storage space be maximised, and the footprints of the truck grids be as small as possible.
“Using 12d and AutoCAD, we modelled swept paths for a variety of vehicles from super B-doubles to automated straddle carriers,” Dahan said. “We converted the dead space of an underpass below the ramp to form part of the ‘loop road’ to the new truck grid locations. This was a huge space-saving measure that delivered a large footprint of additional container stacking space to the port.
“When we develop an engineering design, we are often looking at a piece of paper or a digital model. What you really need to think about is what someone’s going to do with the model, and how they are going to use it to construct the project.”
Dahan advises young engineers to think critically and think outside the box.
“Always ask how the project will be delivered, built and operated, and how you can appeal to the client’s interests with this design solution. To do this, it is important to thoroughly understand your client’s goals and values.”
Delayed gratification
It can sometimes take years to see an innovative idea come to fruition. Trevelyan has first-hand experience with this.
He was part of a design team of about 30 engineers distributed between Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in Melbourne and Amalgamated Wireless Australia in Sydney. The group were tasked with designing the Barra passive array sonobuoy, which is recognised as one of Australia’s most successful defence joint-development projects. The sonobuoy was dropped from aircraft and helicopters into the ocean, and could detect submarines and surface ships.
“My first job was to simulate the behaviour of the array in very rough seas, and I took over one of the most powerful computers in Australia at that time,” Trevelyan explained. “This was at the head office of AMP Life Insurance.”
On studying the array in motion, he realised it generated interference noise as it heaved up and down on the end of the elastic cable.
“I devised the drogue, an underwater parachute, to anchor the array to the surrounding mass of water. At first, it was hard to convince the design team that this was necessary. However, testing a prototype array in a 25 m-high water tank at Fishermans Bend in Victoria confirmed my calculations. The drogue reduced array movement to an acceptable level.”
Testing revealed another design weakness – the tubes would not reliably separate from the piston.
“I thought a simpler and cheaper arrangement would work just as well, but soon found that there was too much hydrodynamic friction between the tubes at the joints. Electrochemically etching tiny holes in the tubes greatly reduced the hydrodynamic friction.”
But there wasn’t a great deal of enthusiasm for this solution, and Trevelyan subsequently moved on to another job in Perth.
“I met up with the project team several months later and they told me that, once they applied my idea to the conventional design, it was so reliable they never had to worry about the problem ever again.”
Fresh perspective
Working in increasingly complex environments with diverse stakeholders requires engineers to continuously hone their communication skillset to adapt to different audiences and translate novel ideas.
“We have found through delivering our training that while engineers are typically good at explaining their ideas to other engineers, they sometimes find it harder to translate into common terminology,” said Mark White, Senior Learning and Development Advisor, Engineering Education Australia. “If engineers can refine and tailor how they present a quantifiable, tangible dollar benefit to the organisation, more stakeholders will support an innovative solution, as they can see the upside if the risks are low.”
Addressing this issue, Engineers Australia has developed several micro-credentials that any engineer can add to their toolkit.
“Micro-credentials like stakeholder engagement are a valuable tool to support innovation and manage risk,” said White. “Having the skills to engage with stakeholders and ensure that their needs are identified and addressed can be vital to making an innovative idea a reality.”
White believes innovation can come from strange places, and it can sometimes address problems that have been lingering in an organisation for years.
Mark tells of his time working as a learning and development consultant with a water authority.
“They had a problem balancing the water flow in the system that pumped clean water to houses,” White said. “Two big stations pumped water up each side and there was a dead spot where those systems joined.
“This problem had been around for years, until one young engineer suggested running only one pump at 100 per cent capacity half the time, and then doing the same with the other pump for the remaining time. Alternating the two pumps helped flush the system and was a new way of operating the water network.”
Simple examples like this prove the value of fresh perspectives and the ability to effectively communicate.
This article was originally published in the May 2025 issue of create with the headline “At the bleeding edge”.
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Further reading
