Research facilities

The Academy Library houses exceptional print and electronic scholarly resources that support teaching, learning and research at UNSW Canberra.

The Advanced Composite Research Unit (ACRU) Composites Laboratory houses an American autoclave, which is used for manufacturing high-quality polymer matrix composite components.

The centrepiece of UNSW Canberra Space is Australia’s first space mission concurrent engineering design facility.

UNSW Institute for Cyber Security is home to a number of laboratories used for simulating and addressing cyber attack scenarios.

The Aviation Safety Studio is a space dedicated to flight simulation for teaching concepts such as aviation safety, aircraft performance, aircraft design, and flight stability and control.

A speck of dust has the potential to cause major issues for spacecraft. Our Class 10,000 cleanroom provides a pristine environment for the development, integration and build of our satellites and various subsystems.

The Digital Forensics Lab at UNSW Canberra is a dynamically configurable space that can be used to simulate and conduct different digital forensic investigation scenarios.  

The ³He⁴- He dilution refrigerator has base temperatures of 5 mK and is used as a low-temperature platform.

We have a suite of electron spin resonance (ESR) spectrometers employed for conventional, pulsed and electronically detected ESR. 

We play a vital role in the US Air Force Academy’s worldwide Falcon Telescope Network, housing one of the 12 telescopes. Working in collaboration with institutions from across the globe, the UNSW Canberra provides the infrastructure needed to support the Canberra node. 

During 2020, the need to reach students normally studying face-to-face on wireless security was prioritised and a strategy enacted to allow UNSW Canberra to create our VPN Wireless Range.

The Advanced Composite Research Unit (ACRU) Composites Laboratory houses a hot press, which is used to manufacture thermoplastic composite parts and specimens.

The Indoor Robotics Flight Test Facility is a large netted area (10m x 10m x 4m) used for testing robots indoors. The laboratory is equipped with a 20-camera motion capture system that tracks the position and orientation of multiple robots at speeds up to 200 times per second.

The Innovation Lab seeks to apply creativity, high-performance computing and advanced machine learning to a range of emerging challenges in cyber security, space, signals processing, and modelling.

Our PC laboratory areas have 105 seats in the new facility and 140 overall when you include older lab spaces. Our server hosts more than 2000 virtual machines, 360 threads, 6TB RAM and 140TB all SSD storage across an 8-node hyper-converged private cloud. 

Lead by Dr Maryam Ghodrat, Pyrometric lab is UNSWs’ fire testing laboratory offering state of the art facilities and expertise to evaluate the fire performance of materials, products and systems under direct and indirect flame and radiative heat fluxes.

A shielded radiochemistry laboratory is available for the safe storage of radioactive samples, and the preparation of wet and open radioactive sources. It features several flow cabinets and detectors for activity evaluation.

The radioisotope implanter is used for the low energy (50–150 kV) ion implantation of radioisotopes as negative ions.

The Advanced Composite Research Unit (ACRU) Composites Laboratory houses a reusable vacuum bagging system, including Heatcon composite bonders for thermosetting resin curing.

UNSW Canberra Space is equipped with two satellite ground stations that enable us to communicate with our spacecraft. One is located on campus, while a larger industrial-grade satellite is positioned just outside the ACT border in Yass, hosted by our ground station partner Cingulan Space.

The SCADA table, otherwise known as 'Tiny Town', is a miniature scale critical infrastructure town, using real critical infrastructure hardware and software to control low voltage systems.

Special Collections, Canberra supports research and teaching with unique manuscripts, rare books, photographs, maps, posters, oral histories and audiovisual collections.

The Structural Testing Laboratory (soils, concrete and steel) houses a wide variety of testing facilities.

A suite of spectrometers is routinely employed for 57Fe- and 169Tm-Mössbauer spectroscopy measurements at room temperature and over the temperature range, 4.2 - 300 K, with a high-temperature furnace (300- 720 K) for 57Fe.

The Supersonic Wind Tunnel and Shock Tube Laboratory houses a Mach 2 to 3 blowdown supersonic tunnel and two shock tube facilities for steady and non-steady high-speed flow experiments. All three facilities are used for the investigation of steady and non-steady high-speed flows.

The T-ADFA facility is an Australian-developed experimental device capable of generating flows with up to 12 times the speed of sound at temperatures that can simulate Earth entry conditions and hypersonic air-breathing flight.

The Thermal Vacuum Chamber Laboratory replicates space environments and is used to test how objects and materials will behave in those conditions. It features two chambers and solar simulation capability.

The two-stage light gas gun is one of UNSW Canberra's flagship pieces of equipment. It's versatile and boasts three different firing configurations to suit the needs of most high-velocity impact experiment.