The Young Precision Network (YPN) - part of the DSPE community -organises events for young professionals and students. On Thursday 7 December 2023, just three weeks after the Precision Fair, YPN organised yet another activity, this time a visit to Demcon high-tech systems in Best (NL), in the Brainport Eindhoven region. As a full-service design house, Demcon has an extensive mechatronic engineering track record in a wide range of markets and applications, from which their Best office focuses mainly on high-tech systems, life sciences & health, and data-driven solutions.
How to show all that in just one afternoon? Well, by inviting speakers with different backgrounds to present their role within the company. Managing director of Demcon life sciences & health Lisa op 't Hof, who recently transferred from a bigger company to Demcon, introduced the company and pointed out some of the benefits of working for a smaller and more entrepreneurial company such as Demcon. After a short tour around the facility including demonstrations, the next presentation came from Randy Smeenk, a mechatronic system engineer who was tasked with the development of a metrology frame that must be as still as possible with respect to a global reference, while being mechanically supported by a vibrating base frame.
Rather than presenting his approach directly, he first let the audience give it a try with blank pieces of paper and whiteboard markers. All three groups came to more or less the same fundamental approach: make the eigenfrequency of the metro frame suspension to the base frame a few orders lower than the frequency range where measurements have to be accurate, and optionally add a tuned mass damper to filter the suspension resonance.
Demcon, however, came to a different solution, which included an intermediate body that was in turn suspended by a spring and a serial spring-damper combination. This gave so much gain reduction at high frequency that they were able to keep the overall vibrations below spec, even with noise and internal dynamics. Want to know more? An article about this project appeared in the December 2023 issue of Mikroniek.
This interactive part, along with the usual 'talking moments, gave the group ample opportunity to reflect on the content presented by Demcon as compared to their own experiences in the precision engineering profession, which is one of the main reasons for bringing this group together. YPN thanks Demcon for their well-organised and interesting company visit and of course everyone involved for their great enthusiasm and participation. See you in 2024 for more YPN activities!
(report by YPN board: Maurits van den Hurk, Matthijs van Gastel and Marc Gritter)
