Do you know what we did last summer?

Lisa Hecker (2016 cohort), Oliver Vanderpoorten and Pelumi Oluwasanya (2015 cohort) attended the Sensorik Summerschool in Regensburg, Germany in September 2018.  Here’s a little flavour of some of the fun they had.

On day 1 of the School, Dr Hubert Steigerwald exclaimed “Sensors are everywhere” as he talked about the importance of this technology in automotive, mobiles, photography, medicine, safety and how it works.  Further talks were given by Stefan Gottwald and Harald Schmid.  Harald is the CEO of Gramm UG and is an expert in industrial design for additive manufacturing.  Participants were then introduced to 3D printing.

Day 2 of the School was focussed on Smart Engineering and Production.  Participants were welcomed to the Infineon Technologies plant in Regensburg where they were given an overview in semiconductor manufacturing flow and then a guided tour.  Later in the day, guests were welcomed to BAM GmbH by Dr Christian Heining who gave an overview of the company.  Participants then looked further at 3D printing.  One attendee commented that “the coolest part of working with a 3D printer is the possibility to combined different materials and to produce nearly everything you have in mind”.

Future Cities was the subject of day 3 of the School.  The day started with facts and figures about the Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen (located in Regensburg) – a well-known world market leader in the field of transformer switching.  Next, an overview from Dr Stefan Kramer of Softwareentwicklungs GmbH on the current state of technology in the field of smart metering.  Dr Ralph Wirth of OSRAM GmbH presented the state of the art presence in sensing.  Lisa Hecker later commented “I am working with optics so I am interested and was looking forward to the lecture of OSRAM to get some news”.  A further presentation from AVL Software and Functions GmbH on solutions for almost all modes of transportation was received by the group.

Day 4 was centred on Industrial Machine Vision.  Participants visited Zollner Elektronik AG, who are another internationally operating member of the sensor network.  After lunch, Dr Wolfgang Ulrich of Sturm Maschinen and Anlagenbau GmbH greeted the group in Salching.  Dr Ulrich gave a presentation on vision technology for process monitoring and participants were then able to see various cleaning and drying systems, test prank cases and, of course, lots of sensors, which were used for surface roughening of cylinders.

The final day saw participants immersed in Innovative Trends in Research and Development.  Johannes Summer and Andreas Hofmeister of Sensorik-Bayern GmbH provided examples from the life of a research and development company.  The last lecture of the Summerschool was another trip, this time into the future.  The topic of the Internet of Things was not missing here.  “Sometimes the difficulty is to build a team out of a group of people with specialties of different working fields working individually”, Professor Rene Peinl of iisys Hof commented.  His institute is currently working in the areas of hardware and software. 

Oliver Vanderpoorten commented “It was interesting to experience the integration of additive manufacture within industrial companies and to learn about current state-of-the-art.  The visit to Infineon – my personal favourite – gave an insight into chip manufacturing on a large scale and the process engineering involved.  The lectures about software engineering and data handling emphasised the drive for industry 4.0 and the IoT and summarised well all the important facts about these trends.”

Lisa, Oliver and Pelumi had a fantastic time and would most certainly attend an event like this again in the future.