Professor Liangchi Zhang receives 2011 UNSW Inventor of the Year award

Congratulations to Professor Liangchi Zhang, FTSE, the winner of the Science and Engineering category as well as the UNSW Inventor of the Year 2011 Award. Professor Zhang has developed a range of inventions related to the cutting and polishing of materials. The new cutting tip for the rock and coal mining industry which has a dramatically improved wear resistance compared with existing designs, reduces cutting force, energy consumption and dust generation. The silicon polishing technique is for the semiconductor industry, which produces damage-free mono-crystals silicon wafers with surface roughness less than a nanometre without
using any chemicals. The diamond polishing technique reduces the processing time in industry from about 4 hours to about 18 minutes.