• Gravity Sand Casting facilities
• Gravity Permanent Mould Casting facilities
• Rapid Sand Casting facilities (Aluminium, Magnesium)
• Investment Casting
• Low Pressure Permanent Mould Casting expertise
• High Pressure Die Casting facilities (400T Buhler SC Machine)
• Semi Solid Casting (New Direct Injection Semi Solid Casting using a modified HPDC machine)
• Casting process simulation (MagmaSOFT, ProCAST, QuickCAST, NovaCAST, Flow3D)
• Patented numerical optimisation and mapping technique for tooling build (OPTCAST)
• Tooling and casting design analysis and optimisation
• Foundry management
• Casting defect analysis
• Melt quality analysis (shop floor hydrogen and inclusion tools - Prefil, new Kbar, spiral molds)
• "Lean" casting implementation into foundries
• "Gemba" ("Shop Floor") Kaizen best practices.

Rapid Magnesium Alloy Sand Casting Lab

High Pressure Die Casting and

developing Semi Solid Casting Lab

Plastic Injection Molding

• 250T injection molding machine (largest machine in NZ for research purposes).
• Tooling design
• Mold flow analysis
• Collaboration with Plastics NZ and NZ Centre for Plastics.

Materials and Metallurgy Research Group

• Casting (Al/Mg alloys, MMCs) including semisolid casting processing
• Extrusion (physical metallurgy)
• Tool/die materials (heat treatment & coating analysis)
• Galvanizing metallurgy & interfacial reaction
• Microstructure analysis
• Mechanical properties
• Failure analysis
• Interfacial reaction.

Welding Research Group

• Friction stir welding (tool design and flow analysis)
• TIG, MIG and plasma welding (metal transfer and solidification)
• Thermal and mechanical measurements
• Microstructure analysis and mechanical testing

• Rapid Prototyping using FDM and 3D Printing
• Direct Metal Casting
• Rapid Tooling
• RP for Medical Applications
• Rapid Manufacture of Light Alloy Products
• Numerical Analysis
• Rapid Software Prototyping
• New Product Development Process
• Computer Aided Design (CAD)
• CAD/CAM/CAE
• Simulation, modelling and performance prediction
• Rapid prototyping
• Rapid product development
• Materials selection
• Process design
• Competitive manufacturing technologies