Having Faith to Achieve Your Goals
Posted
on Sep 13, 2011
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Dianna Boddy, FIEAust, CPEng, the 2010 winner of the prestigious Australian Engineers A.G.M. Michell Medal, addressed the Rotary Club of Hawthorn about her life and achievements. She is a remarkable woman who has made impressive contributions to the field of mechanical engineering with ingenuity and a vast range of theoretical knowledge and application. |
Dianne completed her formal education with Matriculation and a Commonwealth Scholarship to University. However, her family situation required that she join the work force and so became a Tracer at F.M.C Ltd in Melbourne, a branch of an American company and specialists in heavy mining machinery, food processing and harvesting machinery.
She was immediately enthralled with what engineering offered and set about learning every aspect of design and manufacture that she could access. The company had huge manufacturing facilities that were readily accessible to her.
Machine design fascinated her and she rapidly became a competent draftsperson, soon being entrusted with small original design projects. At the age of 23 was put in charge of the design of all food processing plant and equipment handled by the company.
Her first major invention was in the late 1950's when she was able to eclipse the work being done by their American parent company's research centre, in developing a new automatic peach feeding plant for canning. In less than a week she prepared a conceptual design for building such a machine, at well under half the cost of the American prototype being developed at that time and with outstandingly superior features. Within a year she was sent to the USA to prepare production design drawings of her machine. Following field testing, her design was adopted for manufacture and world wide distribution. Her ongoing career was now firmly established.
Throughout these years she gained a string of world firsts and designed several complete processing plants. Her responsibilities expanded to include Manager Leased Machinery Operations & supervision of the Service Division, Manager R&D, and an Associate Directorship.
She left F.M.C in 1967 and became Executive Engineer of one of the Goulburn Valley canneries to spend six years totally modernizing and expanding the plant's production facilities. In the process she gained patents for a new means of processing canned fruit and syrup. In 1973 she was engaged as a consultant in canning plant design to build a fruit canning industry in WA. Following this she relocated to Perth and became engrossed in mechanical design with projects for three Government departments, a consultancy to ASEAN and an appointment by the Government to the board of an R&D company to automate a protein extraction process from waste materials.
As well as designing equipment she also produced prototypes in her own small but well equipped workshop that she established and operated herself.
In 1981 she joined a Robotic Sheep Shearing research project at the University of WA as senior mechanical design engineer. She then acquired a whole set of new skills and numerous patents and was soon sought for consultancy design in Environmental Fluid Dynamics, Civil Engineering Materials Testing and Geo-Mechanics Centrifuge research equipment.
In 1987 she gained membership of the Institution of Engineers Australia with Chartered status. (Editor’s note: to achieve this with only minimal formal education is exceptionally rare.)
Today she looks back on approximately 2,000 documented designs, some 40 patents ranging through the countless fields and never having a supervisory mechanical engineer directing her mechanical design abilities for the last 55 years.
A truly great woman and great engineer who lived by the concept that you can do anything you set your mind to. She is an inspiration to us all.
She was immediately enthralled with what engineering offered and set about learning every aspect of design and manufacture that she could access. The company had huge manufacturing facilities that were readily accessible to her.
Machine design fascinated her and she rapidly became a competent draftsperson, soon being entrusted with small original design projects. At the age of 23 was put in charge of the design of all food processing plant and equipment handled by the company.
Her first major invention was in the late 1950's when she was able to eclipse the work being done by their American parent company's research centre, in developing a new automatic peach feeding plant for canning. In less than a week she prepared a conceptual design for building such a machine, at well under half the cost of the American prototype being developed at that time and with outstandingly superior features. Within a year she was sent to the USA to prepare production design drawings of her machine. Following field testing, her design was adopted for manufacture and world wide distribution. Her ongoing career was now firmly established.
Throughout these years she gained a string of world firsts and designed several complete processing plants. Her responsibilities expanded to include Manager Leased Machinery Operations & supervision of the Service Division, Manager R&D, and an Associate Directorship.
She left F.M.C in 1967 and became Executive Engineer of one of the Goulburn Valley canneries to spend six years totally modernizing and expanding the plant's production facilities. In the process she gained patents for a new means of processing canned fruit and syrup. In 1973 she was engaged as a consultant in canning plant design to build a fruit canning industry in WA. Following this she relocated to Perth and became engrossed in mechanical design with projects for three Government departments, a consultancy to ASEAN and an appointment by the Government to the board of an R&D company to automate a protein extraction process from waste materials.
As well as designing equipment she also produced prototypes in her own small but well equipped workshop that she established and operated herself.
In 1981 she joined a Robotic Sheep Shearing research project at the University of WA as senior mechanical design engineer. She then acquired a whole set of new skills and numerous patents and was soon sought for consultancy design in Environmental Fluid Dynamics, Civil Engineering Materials Testing and Geo-Mechanics Centrifuge research equipment.
In 1987 she gained membership of the Institution of Engineers Australia with Chartered status. (Editor’s note: to achieve this with only minimal formal education is exceptionally rare.)
Today she looks back on approximately 2,000 documented designs, some 40 patents ranging through the countless fields and never having a supervisory mechanical engineer directing her mechanical design abilities for the last 55 years.
A truly great woman and great engineer who lived by the concept that you can do anything you set your mind to. She is an inspiration to us all.