Elexon Electronics is forging its future in the defence space via extraordinary innovation. Manufacturers’ Monthly speaks with co-owner Leigh Bateman about the company’s sensor technologies and a range of products for niche local and export markets.

Elexon Electronics’ roots begin in 1992 when entrepreneur Leigh Bateman founded its predecessor – an engineering company called IEDEC. In 2006, Bateman was approached by a former customer, Pieter Kuiper, who has a wealth of experience in the industry.

“When Peter approached me, I was reaching the end of my limits in growing the company and he had a lot of skills to add,” said Bateman. “He comes from the big end of town having worked for the European Space Agency and as a chief engineer with over 100 engineers underneath him at Boeing. He knew the big systems and processes, so we decided to combine our skills and started Elexon. My engineering street smarts and his process acumen was and continues to be a great combination.”

Today, Elexon has grown to be one of Australia’s most exciting innovators. The company recently enhanced its manufacturing capabilities, procuring six new state-of-the-art machines for its Industry 4.0 manufacturing facility as part of its defence-readiness program. With interconnectedness front of mind for the company, Elexon has set its sights on building upon the IP it has developed – having already pioneered various highly innovative and commercially successful products for a range of industries such as mining, pathology, automotive and recently defence.

Elexon’s mining division, Elexon Mining, provides innovative tracking devices for measuring ground movement in underground and surface mines. The wireless underground systems allow more accurate and active management of the ore body and help open pit mine operators manage mine assets.

“Our journey in mining started with a gentleman I met who was doing a PhD in understanding how ore was flowing in an underground mining process. In above ground mining, for every bit of ore you want to extract, there’s overburden to remove which is expensive. Underground mining has higher up front capital costs but much lower operation costs, but underground geology is super complex and it’s hard to understand how this expensive asset is performing.”

Elexon Mining has developed the Cave Tracker System in collaboration with Newcrest, Mining3 and Rio Tinto, to provide real-time insight into cave flow and cave propagation.

Cave Tracker uses magnetic beacons which are embedded in the orebody – the technology within these trackers spin at a particular speed to generate a magnetic field.

“We use very sensitive magnetometers to look at the rotating magnetic fields and triangulate their rotating position through solid rock,” he explained. “That way we can get a triangulated location of these beacons, and then look for movement of those beacons, giving the mine engineers the ability to understand which parts of the cave are moving and which parts are not.”

Part of Elexon’s innovation strategy is to collaborate with Australian industry, exemplified by the Cave Tracker system’s origins.

“The IP for the rotating magnet came out of a Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) in Brisbane,” he said. “We worked with the CRC and several large mining companies to form a three-way partnership to then develop that IP into a commercial product, which involves investment from the mining companies, investment from us and grants from the government.”

“A practical example of the application is a project where there was 100 million dollars of ore between two caves,” he said. “By seeding our systems into the gap between the two ore caves, we could prove that the asset was being extracted.”

Elexon’s other system for mining is called the Smart Marker, which uses hardened radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to automate the marker detection process.

“The short distance communication radio devices are put in strings down holes and communicate data up and down the holes,” he said. “The tilt of the marker can be recorded because we have very accurate accelerometers that measure the rotation of the device. We can also put in pore pressure sensors, which effectively measure the hydrostatic water pressure underground in the mine.”

The system provides a more robust and versatile alternative to other cave monitoring systems because the data is transmitted wirelessly through rock and therefore isn’t vulnerable to hole dislocation and cable breakage.

Almost a fifth of the whole mammalian species are made up of microbats – a fact which surprises most considering they are rarely seen from day to day. As a result, the bats are crucial for our ecosystem and much research is undertaken about their habits.

Elexon Electronics is the world’s second largest manufacturer in microbat instrumentation. One such system involves active handheld instrumentation which displays a spectrogram to identify the species of bat when they vocalise.

“We’ve made systems now that you can leave for a month strapped to a tree, and it will record all of the ultrasonic bat calls in that one month period onto an SD card which you can then later analyse on software we’ve developed as well,” Bateman noted. “We even manufacture the specialist ultrasonic microphones with different polar patterns on site as well.”

This data is used to monitor ecosystem health. For instance, white nose syndrome is a fungal disease rapidly decreasing America and Canada’s bat population and much research is being done to understand how to stop millions of bats from dying prematurely. The same system has multiple applications, however, and Elexon is looking to expand its range to suit more industrial applications.

“For defence it could be passive field sensors that will look for acoustic signatures the military are interested in,” he explained. “Or you might have a conveyor belt which goes for 20 kilometres and you want to monitor the health of the bearings, helping you do early failure analysis.”

All livestock in Australia are tracked by the National Livestock Identification scheme, which is a key pillar in biosecurity for the country. All cattle have an electronic and visual ear tag which tracks their movements from the farm through to the saleyard and abattoir, which is collated in a national database.

Victoria has mandatory EID for sheep, and the rest of Australia is expected to follow suit.

“RFID reading has been a 15 year journey for us,” Bateman began. “We’ve developed the world’s best performing industrial readers with the longest read ranges in industry. We’re about the only system in industry that can properly survive the conditions that the livestock industry needs. It’s very rough, the animals are big and robust, so we have multiple types of reader systems to read these electronic tags.”

This technology is feeding into the mining and defence space for Elexon, leveraging experience in the low frequency RFID range (around 130 kilohertz) to develop new products.

Global supply chain issues have tilted more focus onto onshoring and returning Australia’s sovereign capability. Elexon has turned to local manufacturing to avoid supply hold-ups and travel costs.

“The mining products use specialist plastic, which we found was more commercially viable to make in Australia than in China where they were previously manufactured,” Bateman said. “Almost all our plastics are made locally. The reasonably elaborate metal boxes made up for the mining industry to house the electronics are all fabricated locally which is a win for Australian industry.”

Elexon has recently worked with Australian telemetry solutions provider Gasbot, who help gas companies schedule refilling of their gas bottles.

“Initially Gasbot was using an Australian manufacturer to outsource its fabrication to China,” he said. “There were multiple issues in that process, from communication to time delays.”

Over the last 18 months, Elexon has helped Gasbot reshore that manufacturing back to Australia and mass-manufacture the growing product to volumes which will likely be hundreds of thousands per year.

“The product is an IoT system which helps to develop a comprehensive understanding of gas levels across an entire fleet of LPG tanks,” Bateman added. “Instead of trucks having to waste fuel filling half empty tanks, they can now use these IoT systems to schedule when the trucks are going to refill, saving money and helping the environment.”

Elexon recently invested a further $1.9 million in developing its state-of-the- art Industry 4.0 defence and aerospace manufacturing facility by securing a Sovereign Industrial Capability Priority grant (SICP).

The company is taking strides in the defence space, and now has the appropriate government backing after engagement with the Centre for Defence Industry Capability (CDIC).

The successful implementation of environmental management standards ISO 14001 and aerospace quality standards AS 9100D involved also Elexon upgrading its physical and cyber security to protect IP – both Elexon’s and that of trusted Defence partners.

“We theorised about why Germany is such a great powerhouse of manufacturing when they have a very high-cost base like Australia,” Bateman explained. “They invest heavily in tools, people and systems and expect a return on that investment. Despite a higher upfront investment, they reap long term rewards of a lower cost of manufacture.”

The SICP grant turbocharged Elexon’s ability to bring in capital equipment as well as training for its workers. The interconnected new facility contains equipment such as jet printing , vacuum vapour phase soldering, automatic optical inspection, selective soldering, robotic encapsulation, flying probe testing, robotic board marking and conformal coating, board cleaning and automated storage towers.

“Before it would take us six hours to change over a job on our robots,” he said. “You can imagine that when you’re a short-run manufacturing facility, that six- hour changeover is a productivity killer. The new robots can be loading on the next job while the current job is running so the changeover time is a matter of minutes.”

Learn more about Elexon Electronics here.

For over 55 years, Manufacturers’ Monthly has lead and informed Australia’s manufacturing industries with its highly credible editorial environment and its acclaimed analysis of issues affecting manufacturing