PRISM-SAOT Summer School on Additive Manufacturing
11. – 17.06.2017, Princeton, NJ
For building a broader basis for future collaboration, PRISM and SAOT established the PRISM-SAOT Summer School which was first held in Princeton from the 11th to the 17th of June 2017. PRISM and SAOT are both conducting research in the fields of laser material processing and material science. Those two topics are connected closely in several ways and collaborations were established between two institutes. Since the interest in Additive Manufacturing (AM), such as laser beam melting (LBM), is exponentially increasing over the past years, for the first Summer School it was decided to focus on various aspects of AM process. Therefore, seven SAOT researchers from different fields of research dealing with AM, from process simulation to sensing and control and process development, traveled from Erlangen, Germany, to Princeton, U.S., to meet with fellow researchers.
The framework of the whole week was the “Startup Contest” where four groups with three students each, mingled from PRISM and SAOT with different scientific backgrounds, managed to conceive the best idea for a startup related to AM. The mixing of the group did lead to an open idea finding process instead of restricting idea to specific fields of research, and successfully resulted to a variety of new approaches for establishing a startup company in the AM business.
The first PRISM-SAOT Summer School showed the high potential of international research collaborations. The group of participants from PRISM and SAOT included people from Taiwan, Turkey, China, Germany and the US. The diversity of the group, not only regarding research but also regarding the personal background of the participants, made the Summer School a very interesting experience for all students. Due to the vivid discussions during the School, a variety of new collaborative research ideas and specific plans for future collaboration have been developed. Thus, the collaboration between PRISM and SAOT is now standing on a broader basis and future collaborative projects, ranging from ultrashort pulsed laser processing to material characterization for AM applications are in preparation. This also strengthens the collaboration between the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Princeton University in general.
The next PRISM-SAOT Summer School will take place in Erlangen in May 2018.