Max.

Our student-built solar race car attained the world record for the "fastest EV over 1000km on a single charge". Sunswift VII features a Carbon Fibre Moncoque Chassis with Aerodynamic drag coefficient of 0.09. It runs 33.9kWh of Li-Ion Samsung cells and 4.6 square meters of solar panels, powering two 9.3kW in-wheel CSIRO axial flux hub motors. During the record attempt, my role was "Chassis and Bodywork Engineer", representing the Chassis and Bodywork department/sub-team.

Link to ABC news article.

During my time on the team, I learnt how to prepare carbon fibre (wet and pre-preg) parts, helping with the bodywork of the Sunswift VII car. I learnt how to analyse and set up composites FEA simulations using ANSYS Composite prep-post and conduct parametric studies varying the carbon layup.

Read my report on Parametric Composite Modelling for a UNSW FEA course.

I also learnt CAD surface modelling for our chassis exterior designs and how to conduct CFD simulations of our modelled geometries in ANSYS Fluent.

During my time on the team, I wrote my UG Thesis paper on Modelling and Simulation of Energy Harvesting Electromagnetic Dampers applied to the Sunswift VII Solar car. This photo also shows the air ducting which is optimised for air-flow to the battery an cabin which I designed

I designed and manufactured some functional directional air-vents which can withstand the immense heat of the Australian Outback.

My pitch at the PFC Finals Night. As a coffee lover, who couldn't find the perfect barista quality coffee maker to use off-grid whilst driving around Australia, I came up with the idea for "Joule Espresso" - a portable off-grid coffee machine that makes the perfect cup of coffee from anywhere.

The idea is: a temperature and pressure (PID) controlled extraction and steam wand which is powered by a cheap reusuable LPG can. So a $9 LPG can available from any hardware or camping store can make up to 80 "lattes" while you're off-grid. Watch the pitch recording here.

Animated rendering showing the desired form-factor and compact design for the Joule Coffee Maker. The portafilter, steam wand and other components store securely in the housing to prevent damage. The machine should be able to be transported easily in the boot of a car, tray of a ute etc.

This is a working "proof-of-concept" gas-powered coffee machine I built. This set-up shows that it is possible to make up to 80 lattes using a BOM style 500g LPG cannister and that the coffee extraction and steam work to produce a delicious coffee. This machine uses a custom Arduino based control circuit to power a gas burner, heat exchanger, pump, LEDs, buttons and various sensors. Watch the demo video below:

Open (top) view of the PID controlled fin-tube heat exchanger used to capture the energy from the gas burner to heat water for coffee extraction and produce steam efficiently.

Beach shot of an electric longboard that I built in my first year of uni, showing the custom designed laser-cut grip tape pattern. The board features a homebuilt 10S4P 18650 Li-Ion battery built from recycled Dyson vaccum cleaner battery packs, two 2500W 190kV brushless DC motors, and has a top speed of 60km/h and range of around 25-30km.

CAD rendering of the longboard.

The batery enclosure was modelled in CAD, CNC routed from plywood, then vaccumm formed with 3mm ABS plastic to house the custom battery pack, VESC speed controllers, BMS, receiver and anti spark circuitry. A custom heat sink was CNC machined to keep the motor controller MOSFETS cool.

The two beautiful aluminium motor-mounts that were CNC machined from aluminium billet.

Powerblocks aims to provide simple-to-install, safe, structural batteries for homes and urban areas, allowing energy storage to take aesthetically pleasing, reliable forms. This picture shows a 12V battery hub with AC inverter, a custom built BMS, microcontroller, charger and four slots which connect to four 336kWh LiFePo4 batteries. The housings are made from a durable Glass Fibre Reinfoced Polymer (GFRP) and laser-cut steel outer exoskeleton.

An early prototype for a Locking and Release Mechanism which securely latches on to each of the battery cells and accomodates space for electrical connections.

Powerblocks are designed to be abe to be mounted onto walls easily (no certified technician required) and add up to 50kWh of battery storage hidden in plain sight.

An early 12V Powerblocks prototype unit fully assembled.

Animation of the chosen folding bed configuration which allows for mattress space on top and storage beneath. The seats were removed from the cabin, a LIDAR scan was taken and various configurations were modelled. This frame design was built from 25mm aluminium square tube which was TIG welded and bolted to the seat fixtures.

Picture of the interior set-up on a cliff in Western Australia. The right side shows a folding, laser-cut table made from 316 stainless steel.

The car was fitted with a custom air compressor, lights, fridge and 12V battery and charge system. The switches are laser engraved to appear the same as the OEM switches.

Water-tight junction box for fuses and relays powering the 12V accessories.

Nautic attends the 33rd International Defence Industry Exhibition (MSPO 2025) at the Targi Kielce exhibition center in Kielce, Poland. During the trip, we also had the opportunity to visit the DeepSpot testing facility, the world's 2nd deepest pool, where we were able to dive our system in the 45m deep pool. Watch the video of our visit to DeepSpot below.

The TDA (Team Defence Australia) stand at the 2025 MSPO Defence Expo in Poland.

The latest version of the Nautic Smart BCD System for the Oceanic Prestige BCD vest. Nautic integrates a dive computer, closed loop feedback bouyancy control system with a surface Smartphone app that allows you to pre-configure your dive and stay within diving safe limits.

Nautic presents as part of the TDA (Team Defence Australia) stand at the 2025 DSEI (Defence and Security Equipment International) exhibition held at ExCeL London.

Early prototype of the Nautic PCB used in our Smart BCD System.

Small assembly line for Nautic electronics enclosures, during small batcth production run.

Squats, a common rehabilitation exercise, can lead to severe damage if not performed correctly. Enter GyroTracker, a compact Bluetooth-enabled device with on-board gyroscopes and AI software to monitor joint angles and track repetitions. Unlike camera-based apps and outdated manual tools, GyroTracker offers real-time, precise feedback through a smartphone app or built-in display, without complex setup.

CAD Rendering of the Flipsky brushless motor and mount built for my electric hydrofoil project.

Assembled electric hydrofoil surfboard I built using a Takuma "LOL Foil PRO 1600" Hydrofoil wing and mast, an empty second hand Fliteboard "classic" surfboard and custom machined motor mounts, proppellor and mast mount. This project is currently still a work-in-progress.

This lid replaces the OEM staorage compartment cover on a Seadoo Spark and fits a UE Wonderboom Speaker.

This lid replaces the OEM staorage compartment cover on a Seadoo Spark and fits a UE Wonderboom Speaker.

This is a design for steel welded vertical bike rack used for Mountainbike Shuttling. Currently still a work-in-progress.

This is a design for steel welded vertical bike rack used for Mountainbike Shuttling. Currently still a work-in-progress.

Part of a showcase I built in the MCIC makerspace to display the work of some hardware startups I have helped in the makerspace whilst I was a student at UNSW.

A fun LED "Neon" Open/Close sign I built for the MCIC makerspace.

A desktop clock built using old stock soviet IN-14 Nixie tubes I bought from Ukraine which I soldered to a custom PCB (not designed by me) and custom exterior acrylic housing. The Nixie tubes are filled with argon gas and individual filaments for the digits 0-9 which glow orange to display numbers.

Fondue Stand made from Gum-wood on a CNC router and using waterjet cut sheet metal. Holds a pot of Fondue and a burner underneath.

High Speed Data Logger I built to collect some data for my thesis study with Sunswift.

This is an example of a freeform surface body of a car exterior that I modelled whilst experimenting with different surface modelling techniques and learning how to set up CFD simulations whilst working on the UNSW Sunswift solar car team.

Can you guess the design inspiration? :)

Small USB-C power supplies I designed and built.

Vertical bike rack I designed to carry five mountain bikes in a compact space for shuttle runs in bike parks.

Exploring the use of Energy Harvesting Shock Absorbers (EHSA) to replace traditional viscous dampers in vehicle suspensions, capturing electrical energy passively while driving.

Simulations for the Sunswift VII car estimated maximum power dissipation of 63.38 W per front damper and 60.56W per rear damper. Given an efficiency of 30% for state-of-the-art EHSA, around 18-20 W of power could realistically be harvested. Road tests showed each front damper dissipated about 8.3W at 55 km/h on a smooth course.

Notably, the average power dissipation depends only on vehicle speed, road roughness, and tyre damping, and is unaffected by the vehicle's sprung/unsprung mass or suspension characteristics. Read my complete thesis paper here.

Research Scholarship during my undergraduate year investigating machine learning approaches for detecting moving pedestrians in point clouds, using low-cost portable LIDAR scanners. Read the report here or watch me present our combined findings at the Digital Twin Week 2022 Conference:

This Master's project explored a variety of classic Reccurrent Neural Network architechtures, including LSTM; and transformer architectures for processing tweets in the Financial-Phrase-Bank Dataset and classifying their sentiment in regards to a financial entity or stock.

The first model uses 300-dimensional GloVe word embeddings for input text, padded to a maximum length of 101 words. A bidirectional LSTM layer (202 hidden units) feeds into a fully connected layer (100 units), with 3 output nodes for classification via Softmax. View the annotated Jupyter Notebook on my Github.

This Master's project explores semantic segmentation using DeepLabV3+ with different backbone configurations (ResNet-50 and ResNet-101) to enhance feature extraction capabilities on the WildScenes 2D benchmark dataset. By analysing the impact of extracting features from mid- and high-level residual blocks, the study aimed to determine the optimal balance between capturing fine details and abstract representations. View the annotated Jupyter Notebook on my Github.