4M Summer School 2008

As with the previous Summer school, the 2 weeks in the summer of 2008 were intensely packed with lectures, workshops and full scale project work, not forgetting to mention some social activities and good weather, yes, good weather… The amount of time spent each day varied from 8 to 10 hours, sometimes more when the project was taking over.

This year the school attracted 19 students from a number of different countries: UK, Ireland, Norway, Romania, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Poland, Denmark, and Palestine. The lectures covered the following subjects:

They were given by staff from DTU and some guests from 4M participated:
Prof. Stefan Dimov (MEC Cardiff) and Dr. Christian Wenzel (IPT Aachen) both lectured during the course of the school. An industrial guest also gave an insight about micro mechanical systems use in the field of hearing-aid equipment.

From one of the students reports:
“The main task of the summer school was to make a microfluidic mixer with production methods applicable to mass production. During two intensive weeks the task was to come up with a mixing concept, make a CAD drawing of a mixer, make tools for injection moulding, perform injection molding, seal the microfluidic channels, test the mixing device and characterise the produced parts. In the actual work, this was done for two microfluidic mixers. They both fitted within a specified area of 15 mm x 15 mm including inlets, outlets, space for ejector pins and open space for laser bonding. They both apply the laminar mixing principle of stretching and folding in order to make the inter-phase area between the two fluids increase exponentially going down the channel.”

The two process chains chosen by the two groups fall in the direct tooling approach: micro milling of an insert and replication by injection moulding, then joining by laser welding.

Again, the students produced a “paper-like” description of their PhD subject (using the same format as the proceedings of the 4M conferences) that they handed-in before coming to the summer school. They also each gave a 15 minute presentation about their work and their lab. So good networking occurred and nice connections were made.

It was a very pleasant experience from all point of views: excellent learning output, good spirit and casual atmosphere… You can already express your interest for next year edition, dates will be provided as soon as they are fixed. In the mean time, visit the summerschool webpages.