Global Utilities

La Trobe University
Department of Civil Engineering and Physical Sciences

Staff profile

Mal Haysom

Lecturer

Room/Location: Building Applied Science 2, Room 2:16

Qualifications

  • BEng Monash, MSc Melb, MIEAust
  • Registered member and trainer - Registered Engineers for Disaster Relief (RedR).

Teaching areas

  • Mal Haysom teaches in the area of Physics, Engineering and Instrumentation.

  • Application Programming – 1
    A dilatometer is a device used to measure the expansion of a sample over a range of temperatures. Researchers at La Trobe University, Bendigo use a dilatometer to investigate the expansion characteristics of pottery glazes. This information is crucial for the understanding of the crazing that may occur during and after the firing of pottery.

    The dilatometer used at Bendigo has digital outputs for temperature and expansion and is interfaced to a desktop computer. An application program developed by the author maintains a log, and displays a plot of the acquired temperature and expansion data. At the completion of the run it calculates, using regression, the linear expansion of the sample over nominated temperature ranges.

    It also provides a summary of the results in an HTML file.

  • Application Programming – 2
    WFP (United Nations World Food Program) has a program to assist the community in the northern part of Myanmar (Burma) to grow rice. The country is hilly and requires terracing for rice crops. Local hand labour is used to do the terracing. It is desirable that an estimate of the work involved in terracing each plot can be made before the work is started.

    In conjunction with an Australian civil engineer who has been deployed in Myanmar by WFP, Mal Haysom has developed a program to process GPS data and produce a contour map of the plot intended for terracing.

    The program attempts to deal with the uncertainties of autonomous GPS data and to minimise the requirements for obtaining the data. View a sample contour map

Professional involvement

  • Humanitarian Training
    Mal works with RedR Australia training courses in Australia and New Zealand. He presents sessions on maps, compass and GPS. He is also involved in scenario design and role playing for RedR courses.