W.S.G. Isaac Newton

RAMLAB stands for Rotterdam Additive Manufacturing LAB, which is an R&D based company in the port of Rotterdam. Their expertise is on Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM), which is form of 3D-printing of metals by making use of welding robots. They have many different projects running, in which they collaborate with universities and companies such as Lincoln Electric, Valk Welding and Bohler Welding. Their projects can be process based or product based, where a student can choose to optimise the welding process through either process or product analysis. This mainly involves practical work, such as printing products on site by learning how to control welding robots and material analysis afterwards in the UT labs.

My internship was involved in a European project on increasing the lifetime of forging dies through WAAM. Once a forging die has worn out, WAAM technology can print a small layer of tool steel upon the worn out areas, increasing the lifetime of a forging die, decreasing repair time and reducing the costs. However, tool steel is very hard to weld, which made this a challenging and fun assignment which is far from finished. The internship involved learning how the welding robots software worked at RAMLAB, but also material analysis at the UT labs.