Production Technology and I

Finnish parliament workshop suggested to integrate 266 municipalities (FIN: kunta; compare; State) into 70.

News in Helsinki Time’s

This means in the capital city area that Espoo, Helsinki, Vantaa, Kauniainen and Sipoo will integrate into one big city. What this means for University scene? In capital city area, we have two big Universities, Helsinki University and Aalto University. Also there are Universities of Applied Sciences, Theater Academy, Sibelius Academy etc. Hey, lets integrate Aalto and Helsinki University! Lets integrate all the rest too, then we’d have two giants, Top Universities of Helsinki Integrated (TUOHI) and  Helsinki Applied University (HAU).  Then we could outsource all the bachelor level studies in HAU and then continue Master’s studies in TUOHI. Wow!

Ok, enough sarcasm. But I think that this change is going to make difference also in University scene, just can’t image yet how.

Posted by Sampsa

One week to my last exam; Philosophy of Science II. I have done tons of book essays, courses and exercises. I have been studying now for 7 and half years, received my Master’s and done the courses needed for Doctoral degree excluding the last exam. Phew! Now “all” I have left is dissertation.

After Christmas break, I will start my Licentiate thesis on digital manufacturing. I am hoping to write a review on a general level about fundamentals of digital manufacturing, because it seems there is no good study book on the subject. I am thinking that it could be appreciated on my upcoming course also. It is somewhat unorthodox to do Licentiate  thesis on different subject than dissertation, but I haven’t been the standard student anyways.

My Dissertation is now in it’s working phase, I have done quite good research plan and even managed to do one fifth of the work; I have one article pending in a journal of my field. My first paper is on chip breakage of low lead brass, done in collaboration with Oras Oy and Tampere University of Technology. It went well in the viewpoint of the company, we managed to solve the problem of chip breakage. On scientific level, the paper doesn’t contribute much, it is more like the De Facto procedure of using finite element method to solve practical machining problem. What it does bring up is that the material models have serious problems considering coupled effects of strain, strain rate and temperature. Also the procedure of acquiring material parameters by tensile testing, SPHB-testing and cutting experiments was well documented and inspected. I will post the link to the paper if and when it will be published. In case you want to know more.

My following research is to generate a new material model that takes all the phenomenon found in the previous paper into account and implement the model to the software I’m using. Then I compare the results to see if the change of model does improve the simulation accuracy. So I am going to be busy doing my Licentiate thesis, my research and all the teaching I have as my responsibility.

Also news on digital manufacturing; Finnish industrial research foundations; FIMECC and TEKES have this huge manufacturing research project coming up called MANU. It has 30-50M€ for digitalisation of Finnish manufacturing industry. All the largest Finnish companies are already in it, but I heard that small and medium businesses are still wished to take part too. The themes include integration of production and engineering design, management of global business networks and lean and agile production.

Sampsa out, merry Christmas for all!

PS. If you started to wonder how one article is only one fifth of the work needed for dissertation, the reason is that the new guidelines of Aalto University demands five journal papers for dissertation. Isn’t it nice, because in many (read all) other countries demands only two to four papers. I get to do so much more research work, Yay!

Posted by Sampsa

Today we had a training session with Delmia robotics module expert from Delfoi. For those of you that are not familiar of Delmia, it is a software package build around Catia CAD software and has tools for CAM, robotics programming, factory simulation etc. …practically everything. I, our other doctoral student Jaakko and the master’s thesis workgroup I mentioned earlier, attended this full day intensive training session. We modeled an arch welding robot cell and tried some movement programming. It was more simple than I expected, just had to figure out the overall logics in Delmia environment. I got a good picture about the module and have already some ideas how to carry out the excercise(s) on Digital Manufacturing course. We are having also CAM module training in near future.
And by the way, speaking of digital manufacturing… we had discussion in our lab of purchasing some relatively cheap DIY 3D printing kits and having some of our students to build and tweak them as an educational project. It would be a good starting point for building up additive manufacturing knowledge in our school.

UPDATE 28.9.

Today we had second training day with Delfoi specialists. We saw general presentation about Digital Manufacturing and then Quest software training. I discussed the upcoming course of Digital Manufacturing with Delfoi personnel, and they promised to give a visitor lecture in it. I also have much clearer picture about the excercise of the course; integrated use of Delmia robotics module, production line simulation with Quest and Machining Simulation with Mastercam.

I also managed to a get few candidate students to do their theses about machine vision, 3d digitizing and laser sintering. I hope to get good background information through these projects.

I’m off to München for a while so it could take some time when I write next time.

Posted by Sampsa

Sketching is usually the first phase of product development, but all those ideas and nowhere to put them? I wonder how many ideas have started on cover of cigarette packs or napkins and how many is lost due to lack of them. I hope that when our government finally ban all smoking in Finland, products like the boogie board or inkling have reached maturity. For all those ideas to be lost would be tragedy. Boogie board is a LCD screen that can be written on, only erasing the screen uses power. Inkling is a pen that records its movements as vector graphics. Both are inexpensive ways not to carry paper or notebook everywhere to ensure way to record sudden bursts of ideas. Both have their downsides, the pen is useless without paper and the boogie board doesn’t  have a save function yet. Still the potential is enormous. Think of simple mechanical sketch, if one could transfer the vector graphics images to cad software, there would be much less work left to do converting the paper image to proper cad file. For industrial designers, architects and artists this kind of tool is even more useful.

Capturing real world motions, shapes and forms into digital form is important topic in general. Also introducing virtual objects to real world is groving interest in academic and especially in commercial world. I’m hoping to trick one barchelors level student to do his/hers thesis on 3D digitizing. There has been many projects on different inexpensive ways to digitize 3D objects with cameras, touchprobes etc. The thesis could summ them all up and discuss the most promising techniques. The work could be extended to master’s level; measuring, design, machine tool setups… all could benefit from quick 3D measuring. One thrilling idea is using modelling clay to create 3D forms that are shown as 3D models in real time on computer screen. Movie studios have been using this kind of techniques for some time, but the costs have reduced wider exploitation. Costs are no longer the problem because one project used two basic web cameras to create 3D model.

Posted by Sampsa

I just came from Aalto Digital Design Laboratory. They had a introduction day for engineers, architects and designers. The laboratory is just starting and forming itself, but I already see the possibilities; especially in the viewpoint of digital manufacturing. I start my first own course of digital manufacturing for English Master Program of Mechanical Engineering in 2012 and am therefore interested in all things digital. I am also supervising three master’s thesis workers on collaborative digital design and manufacturing. Project is called “Digital Concept Factory”.  The work group consists of one major student of each; production, machine design and industrial design. There are lots of things going on about digital manufacturing; it’s a hot subject it seems.

Digital Manufacturing is really wide concept, that often is understood differently by everyone. I try to use digital manufacturing as a roof concept for all digital tools and paradigms in manufacturing. To point out three major sub sections;

1. collaborative design
2. simulations
3. rapid prototyping, which is nowadays recommended to be called additive manufacturing

The term additive manufacturing is preferred for the method is said to have evolved so that it is applicable also for commercial production. In PLM forum this summer, arranged by Dassault Systemes, one of the main speakers Takatoshi Negishi, former Toyota engineering manager said that additive manufacturing can be used competitively up to batches of 10.000 workpieces until casting is more reasonable choice. That is enough for me to change my thinking from prototyping to manufacturing. Toyota has that kind of effect on engineers. =)

So, I am excited about the new ADD lab, maybe there is totally new production/design paradigm brewing there!

One other thing, in Otaniemi, there is no place where on can get good cup of coffee, but that is about to change for ADD lab is introducing ADD lounge at the middle of mechanical engineering! There was chatter about barista training and order to delivery services. And just on my back yard! Yeay!

Posted by Sampsa

Hello,

I was informed that users.tkk.fi won’t be supported anymore in near future so I had to think an alternative; so I started a new blog.

I hope to write at least somewhat regularly about developments on production technology and of course about my own research.

Posted by Sampsa