YPN visited Demcon High Tech Systems in Best
The Young Precision Network (YPN) - part of the DSPE community - organises events for young professionals and students. On Thursday December 7th, just three weeks after the Precision Fair, YPN organised yet another activity, this time visiting Demcon High-Tech Systems in Eindhoven.
As a full-service design house, Demcon build on their extensive mechatronic engineering track record in a wide range of markets and applications, from which their Best office mainly focuses 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 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 like Demcon. After a short tour around the facility including demonstrations, the next presentation came from Randy Smeenk, a 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 directly presenting his approach, 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 suspension eigenfrequency of the metro frame 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 gives 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 will appear in the December issue of Mikroniek.
The interactive bit, together with the usual ‘talking moments’ gave the group ample opportunity to reflect Demcon’s presented content on our own experiences in the Precision Engineering profession, which is one of the main targets of bringing this group together. We appreciate Demcon for their well-organized and interesting company visit and of course everyone involved for their great enthusiasm and participation. See you next year for more YPN activities!
The YPN board – Maurits van den Hurk, Matthijs van Gastel, Marc Gritter
