Vocational Visit - Tony Alsop reporting.....

Twelve Rotarians plus our Exchange Student had a great Vocational Visit through the CADET Building at Deakin University Waurn Ponds Campus last Thursday.

The tour hosts Cheryl & Sam first showed us the Virtual Reality (VR) Lab and showed us how this can be used by industry to build machinery, plant and buildings in a 3D virtual world to identify problems before construction actually starts.

We also saw how VR can be used to train nurses to identify different types of contractions in expecting mums.

We then toured the 3D Printing Lab which contained printers which can create objects in different materials from plastics to metals. These objects have medical applications such as a replacement jaw bone in titanium to plastic brace for a broken wrist that fits perfectly. Andrew, Alan, Bill and Adrian contemplated how things have changes from the “good old days” of working with metals.

The highlight of the tour was a visit to the High Voltage (HV) Lab which had a large Van der Graff Generator with Tesla Coils contained in a Faraday Cage (whew) that generated lightning like bolts of electricity. After we were checked for pacemakers, fitted with ear muffs and told not to stick our fingers into the cage the lights were dimmed to the comments of “ooh” and the light show began with the electrical sparks producing eerie classical music.

We were told that the arcing electricity could also “play” the themes to Game of Thrones and Star Wars (must go back to hear those ones).

 Many thanks to the School of Engineering at Deakin for a fantastic tour.

To think that they are training our future engineers with the latest technology is reassuring that not only our local students but many international students are in good hands.