Australian Lab Notes - August 2010 - Steve Turvey

If I was asked when I first began the Lab way back in 1989 what we do, my answer would have been very simple, I could have rattled off an explanation of what we do and test in well under 30 seconds. We tested PC’s, portable PC’s (some as big as sewing machines and a lot heavier), servers, laser printers (expensive and as yet no inkjet printers) and various peripherals such as hard drives and 2400 baud modems.

It was easy to manage a Lab and a small team of techies back in those days but more than 21 years later is it anything but easy. Don’t get me wrong I’m certainly not complaining, the work is certainly far more interesting, it would have to be as I’m still here, oh and I also wanted to see the fledgling Lab “grow up”.

Even if we look under just the IT banner there is such a wide range of technology that we now test with the likes of Smartphones, Tablet PCs, MP3 players, VoIP phones, Video Conferencing, Broadband, 3D TV, Video Games, Blue Ray, Alarm Systems and the list goes on. Not only has our range of IT testing expanded it has been accompanied by an increase in the range of test categories here at the Lab.

To be fair some of the categories we have plucked out of the general buzz of IT so we can concentrate expertise and resources to these niches such as Security and Penetration testing, Software testing, Usability and Accessibility testing to name just three. However we have also headed into new territories with our Gaming, Wagering, Lotteries and Casino testing, arguably this has to some extent grown out of the IT sector but I have left the best for last.

Physical and materials testing, and boy does this category cover a lot of ground. We have built test rigs to measure the brittleness and drawing life of Crayons, a Passport wear testing rig, Vibration rigs to test Alarm sensor and car radio susceptibility to vibration, we have tested 50 ton mobile cranes in China for a client in the Middle East but one of my favourites, I have to admit, is testing buses in China.

Not just any old bus of course, no diesel engines in these vehicles, instead an obviously grunty electric motor and a large bank of batteries. The aim is to determine if the eBus really does meet the needs of a typical diesel bus fleet and when you stop to think about it there is more to it than reaching acceptable speed and passenger loads.

With any electric vehicle there is the general concern – where do we charge it? Although this is a lot easier for a suburban bus company as their buses plie known routes and return back to base at the end of each day where a dedicated charger at the Depot can feed them over night.

But what about a tour bus? It can be called upon to go just about anywhere and you can be quite certain that at the end of each day it will probably be a long way from the Depot. So at the end of a Tour bus’s day it must at least be able to plug into a conventional electrical outlet and charge fully in eight hours or less. A plainly impossible task as any back of a dinner napkin quick calc shows that on a 15Amp feed it would take around 6 full days to charge. So I guess a tour bus role is out of the question until dedicated charging stations are available country wide – a long way off.

You might think the role as a suburban route bus is right up the alley of an eBus, at least the bus returns to the Depot for the high powered charger. But did you realise that many route buses are out for 19 to 20 hours a day before they return to the Depot, it’s a big ask for a battery powered bus to last this long on a charge and then it may only have 4 hours to recharge at the depot.