![]() We have scientists with expertise in chemistry and material science. Within the RAMP Centre we’ve got scientists with a range of expertise. The best thing about working with RAMP is working with the scientists and conducting the research and just finding amazing discoveries for our customers. Traditionally when you make a block polymer you might have two or three blocks and using the robots we can make polymers with really amazing and different architectures. This particular week we’re working on some different polymerisation methods, where we’re using CSIRO’s RAFT technology which allows you to make very defined polymers with controlled molecular weights and chemistries and we recently made a polymer that had 17 different blocks in it. ![]() So it makes it easy for everyone in the house if your walls get grubby. We’ve had a project recently in RAMP where we’ve been working with an industry partner to develop new paints and new polymer formulations and so the idea being if we can get the polymers right we can have a paint which can be painted on the wall and if it gets dirty you can easily clean it. We work with food companies and even nutraceutical companies. We work with companies doing formulation, recycling. So we work with companies that make paints, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, catalysts. Our main customers that we work with are companies based overseas and within Australia in various manufacturing industries. We have a catalyst unit called a Flowrence, that’s able to do 48 catalytic reactions in one go and analyse the products which are formedĪnd we also have a Dotbot robot so we can spot materials onto surfaces and we can spot thousands and then analyse those materials and the effects they have on different parameters. It can homogenise, sonify, we can do reactions at high temperature, low temperature and even centrifuge within the robots. The two biggest robots are called Chemspeed Robots and they have an arm which goes around and picks up different tools and so that arm can do different tasks. So we have a number of robots located within the RAMP Centre. They wouldn’t have had a strong intellectual platform from what we discovered as well. They wouldn’t have discovered the range of materials that we discovered. If that company had have conducted that research using traditional methods it would have taken them many more years with a much greater expense. So we’re a very unique facility.Ī great example of research which was conducted within RAMP is a project we had with a company making catalysts and when they did that research we were able to conduct five years worth of research in six months which was absolutely amazing and fantastic for the company to get the outcome so rapidly. Within Australasia, we’re the only laboratory which has the capability to do all the different types of formulation and chemical reactions and characterisation. One of the great advantages of our system is that we can check the robots remotely. You could come in on a Friday, set an experiment up, let it run over the weekend, come in on Monday and you’ve got 100 polymers that you can go away and test. They can actually set up an experiment and then leave and just let the robot do the experiment. The big benefit of the robots is they’re much safer to use and they’re also automated and so you don’t have to have a scientist that’s standing next to a fume hood the whole time. One of the main benefits of using our laboratory is the fact that we use robotics to automate our research which means that we can do research much faster than is commonly done by traditional means. Hi, I’m Ben Muir and I manage the RAMP Centre within CSIRO. The RAMP Centre is part of the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency and we’re open to working with people from all over the globe. ![]() Ben Muir: So the Rapid Automated Materials and Processing Centre is a state of the art laboratory which helps fast track chemicals, materials and formulation research. ![]()
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