With ProMat to Scandinavia's coast

Maylin Homfeldt is a graduate of the Master's degree programme in Process-Oriented Materials Research. She was honoured with the Bremen Thesis Award for her Master's thesis. Maylin is currently pursuing a doctorate at the Leibniz - Institute for Materials Engineering - IWT (Leibniz-IWT). During her studies, she completed her compulsory research stay abroad in H?gan?s, Sweden. She was a visiting student at the company Markforged. Stays abroad at a company instead of a research institution are an exception at ProMat and are only possible with a well-defined research question. Read the report to find out what brought Maylin to the Scandinavian coast.

Maylin is fascinated by the additive binder jetting process. It can be used to produce design items such as watch dials and other complex design geometries. The layer wise approach of the additive manufacturing process allows a high degree of design freedom and the unbound powder surrounding the parts makes support structures superfluous. Another category of components often produced via additive manufacturing are small series, as no expensive moulds and tools need to be produced. Additive manufacturing can therefore be the most economically favourable production method for small series.

Maylin learnt about the binder jetting process in practice during her time at Markforged. Her enthusiasm for additive processes was already awakened in lectures during her studies. She was able to deepen this initial knowledge while working as a student assistant at the Leibniz-IWT. There she focussed on the additive process of Laser-based powder bed fusion of metals (LPBF-LB/M). The master's programme in Process-Oriented Materials Research (ProMat) at the University Bremen enabled her to focus on metal processing and data analysis during her master's degree. She was able to customise her curriculum due to choosing ProMat as her master?s program and additionally she was supported by her personal mentor during her masters. At ProMat, experienced scientists advise and support the students as mentors in individual discussions.

Ideas exchange in Sweden

During the ProMat programme, students spend at least eight weeks at a research institution abroad. Stays abroad in companies are possible on application and with a clearly defined research question. As Maylin had already completed a longer research stay abroad during her Bachelor's degree, she wanted to gain insights into industrial research during her Masters. Markforged is a company that develops its own binder jetting systems and is therefore highly innovative. Together with her mentor Sebastian Boris Hein, who also works in the field of binder jetting, Maylin specified the research stay and worked out a clearly research-related question.

‘It was worth the effort,’ says Maylin, looking back, ’independent work, nice colleagues, cool company. The employees were super open to ideas and driven to keep improving their machines.’

Own project with metal 3D printing

The company Markforged commercially manufactures 3D metal printers that have proven themselves in production.

Maylin has been working on her own research project with the metal printing experts in H?gan?s. In the additive binder jetting process, it is important to exclude faulty components from the multi-stage manufacturing process as soon as a fault occurs. This saves time, material and energy. Maylin has written a defect detection algorithm in Python. The algorithm enables recognition of defects that are visible in the powder bed during printing as the algorithm analyses images that are taken during the printing process. The result is made available in various visualisations, including an interactive 3D plot. This enables a spatial visualisation of the detected defects within the print. To simplify use, Maylin has integrated the algorithm into a user interface.

Maylin says that the company in H?gan?s showed her a lot of appreciation for the work she did. She still has contact with the people who were part of her team . ‘Getting to know Sweden as a country was also fantastic,’ Maylin adds, ’Very cool in the months I was there, but a really beautiful landscape and cute little towns.’

Maylin's path to additive manufacturing

She then pursued to explore the subject of binder jetting in her Master's thesis in her mentor's working group at Fraunhofer IFAM. She continues to focus on topics such as metal processing and data analysis after her Master's degree: Maylin is still active in additive manufacturing and works as a research assistant at the IWT and doctoral candidate in Bremen.