Category: Interviews

Translating academic insights in the field of mechatronics into industrial practice: that is the core of the training offered by Mechatronics Academy. Adrian Rankers, in addition to Jan van Eijk and Maarten Steinbuch co-founder of this training institute, knows what is going on in the field. He is committed to guaranteeing the best trainers, furthering the development of existing training courses and the setting up of new ones.

“The fact that I ended up in the coaching profession is actually quite logical in retrospect, because education has always attracted me,” says Adrian Rankers. “I gave tutoring as early as the age of fifteen. A few hours at first, but soon, that became more. I remember giving tutoring to the son of a top executive at Shell and quickly becoming his complete homework support. My attraction to the technical side certainly had something to do with my father. He had also studied mechanical engineering and worked, first in industry and later as a professor.”

“It is essential to realize that the students still have to go through the learning curve and that some things are quite difficult and might not be obvious to everyone. As a trainer you have to be aware of this and take the time to do so.”

After completing his mechanical engineering studies at Delft University of Technology, Rankers started his career at Philips at the Centre for Manufacturing Technology (CFT). Here he was involved in the dynamics and control techniques for CD players and wafer steppers. In the evening hours, he worked on his PhD research resulting from this work. Parts of this research were later included in the book The design of high-performance mechatronics by Rob Munnig Schmidt, Jan van Eijk, Georg Schitter and Rankers himself. In addition to the development and consultancy work and his role as group leader, he became involved in the development of mechatronics education for Philips’ own employees, initiated by Jan van Eijk. He also joined the board of the Dutch Society for Precision Engineering (DSPE) in 2008, of which he is still a member today.

Mechatronics Academy

Although he enjoyed working there in engineering and technical management, Rankers made the switch to entrepreneurship in 2010 after twenty-five years of loyal service at Philips. He wanted to focus mainly on transferring his mechatronics knowledge. This eventually led to the idea to set up the Mechatronics Academy together with Jan van Eijk and Maarten Steinbuch. It turned out that there was a need for this: the organization can now rely on sixty to seventy trainers with an industrial background in the field. Mechatronics Academy now provides training courses for around four hundred students per year. These are both open training courses and in-company training courses, specially tailored to companies.

“What appeals to me in the field of mechatronics? It is always a multidisciplinary challenge where you work with people from different disciplines. Mechatronics always gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself in all kinds of things. In addition, I like to pass on my knowledge of mechatronics to others,” says Rankers enthusiastically. “In doing so, it is essential to realize that the students still have to go through the learning curve that you yourself have gone through over a number of years and that some things are quite difficult and might not be obvious to everyone. As a trainer you have to have an eye for that and take your time. In accordance with the old saying by Confucius, ‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand,’ we work a lot with exercises in small teams. You see how students struggle to put the theory they have just learned into practice and to master the subject matter, but it is precisely this struggle that is an important part of learning. If I can guide them through this, so that they eventually understand it for themselves, it gives me a lot of satisfaction.”

The trainings that Mechatronics Academy organizes are well-attended and get good reviews from the participants. But that certainly doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels, Rankers believes. “We think it’s important to keep our portfolio up to scratch, to expand and to ensure continuity.”

That’s why at Mechatronics Academy they are constantly working to keep the team of trainers up to strength. Good trainers who quit, because they come of age, are replaced with a new generation. To this end, they approach the best content experts in the field, whom they know from their extensive network. They also ensure that they continually adapt existing training courses to the latest academic insights and technological developments. “We adapt existing modules and develop new ones. In addition, we invest a lot in resources that we use during the practical parts of the training courses. Practical assignments, such as working on constellations or carrying out simulations, form an essential part. These assignments are indispensable for understanding,” Ranker describes.

New courses

In addition to keeping existing training courses up to date, Mechatronics Academy also develops new training courses that arise from a need in the market. Ideas for this come from Rankers, Van Eijk and Steinbuch themselves, but also from their trainers. At DSPE meetings or conferences in the field, everyone sticks out their feelers to know what is going on and where needs lie.

Through these practices, beautiful new training courses are created time and time again. For example, the training “Passive damping for high tech systems,” which started last year and has now run twice. In ultra-precise motion systems, dynamics – both loose and in interaction with control technology – play an important role. That is why in today’s practice, and therefore also in the various courses, much attention is paid to the realization of high eigenfrequencies in mechanics. Understanding mode shapes and the extent to which they can be excited by the actuator or perceived by the sensor is also important here. This approach is and remains essential. But with increasing accuracy requirements, this is no longer always sufficient. You then run into the limit of what is physically feasible. The deliberate addition of passive damping then offers extra solution space and becomes a decisive parameter in achieving extreme specifications.

The new training, which focuses on proven ways to achieve passive damping, is very successful, according to Rankers. It is a highly relevant theme in the precision engineering community. Hans Vermeulen, Kees Verbaan and Stan van der Meulen are the trainers. They have an enormous amount of knowledge of the field. The positive response to the training sessions is also reflected in the reactions of participants: “Excellent training,” “Excellent trainers” and “Very inspiring,” to name a few. “There is even interest in this training from abroad,” reports Rankers proudly.

Then there are a number of new training courses in development. From the training “Actuation and power electronics,” which focuses mainly on electromechanical propulsion, the idea arose to set up a training course specifically for piezo materials and their applications. There are also plans to set up a training course “Active thermal control.” Rankers: “How can you keep the temperature and deformations caused by heat sources manageable in a setup? Which control techniques can be used for this? What are suitable sensors for measuring temperatures and deformations with high precision? And which elements can be used for cooling or heating? These are all questions that will be addressed. The training course ‘Thermal effects in mechatronic systems’ has already briefly addressed this, but it is such an important theme in the world of ultra-precision that a separate training course would be appropriate here.”

“Our current training ‘Basics and design principles for ultra-clean vacuum‘ focuses on molecular contamination and how to prevent it. However, there is also a need for a new training course on ‘Particle contamination’,” continues Rankers. “In this training we will discuss particle contamination in vacuum. Unlike molecular contamination – for example by gas molecules trapped in a blind hole of a part placed in vacuum, which leak through the thread to the ultraclean vacuum – these are small pieces of material. These may be, for example, particles loosened by friction between moving parts of the device placed in vacuum. The knowledge from various studies that are already running in this area could serve as a guideline for this.”

“Together with our trainers, we are constantly working to improve training, set up new training courses and keep our pool of trainers up to standard,” Rankers summarizes. “We also continue to invest in support material for our training courses, so that we can link the theory we cover directly to industrial practice. This is where our strength lies: translating academic insights into industrial practice, so that trainees can directly deploy their knowledge in our high-tech industry. This is how we continue to keep our training package up-to-date and deliver the best trainers, so that we can continue to live up to the designation ‘excellent training’.”

This article is written by Antoinette Brugman, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

“Wendy Luiten describes the first two training days of her first online Cooling of Electronics. “I’m used to looking into the classroom. Then I immediately see how the material lands.” Because of this, the pace of this remote classroom is a bit slower, according to Wendy. “In classroom trainings, I talk to people and it’s easier to look over shoulders.”

When I called her on the evening of the second day of the training, Wendy said that she was quite tired the day before, but that it was already getting better. “It takes some getting used to. Hopefully, it will continue this way over the next three days.”

Cat Okkie was the very first participant of Wendy’s online module. After attending the first two days, Okkie seems happy. Credits: Martine Raaijmakers.

During Wendy’s presentations, the cameras of many participants are off. In part, they do this to squeeze the highest quality video and audio out of the connection. But it has also been common practice for many years for remote consultations. Wendy: “At video meetings, people say hello at the start, then we have a suggestion round and then, the cameras go off. With video view, the tension curve is also more intense.”

Furthermore – and this was also to be expected – students do not automatically look for each other during breaks for social interaction. In the classroom version, there is usually a positive vibe at the coffee machine. “Now, that’s almost gone,” says Wendy. “If I want them to look for each other, I have to give them a push. It’s something to remember for next time.”

The Cooling of Electronics training course is strongly practice-oriented. “People often run into very practical issues in their work. They often have more than enough theoretical background, but are faced with very simple decisions: where should the gap be, or how much space needs to be saved? Therefore, my training is quite concrete. During the exercises, people work with a spreadsheet because that is sufficient for a first-order assessment. They have to learn to make decisions at the CAD drawing level because it’s only a design when you can draw it”.

Wendy estimates that she spends about 60 percent of the time ‘sending’ (lecturing), while the other 40 percent of the time, the students spend 40 doing exercises. Initially, she planned to save exercises for the end of the day. In the meantime, however, she has noticed that it’s best to go between theory and practice. “And it works well to turn on the cameras during the exercises.”

Because of the excellent preparation, there were no technical issues. However, there was still a small bump. Wendy and program leader Hans Vink sent the material via WeTransfer, but some companies do not allow the use of this tool for large digital mail items. The solution was simple: the participants concerned solved it via their private email address.

This blog is the second blog of a series in which we share our first experiences with online training.
Read the first blog here.

Soon: the evaluation by the participants.

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

With more than 30 years of experience with some of the top names in the Netherlands’ high-tech industry, Cees Michielsen reflects on his lessons learned and how he tries to relay this knowledge as the instructor of the “System requirements engineering improvement” training at High Tech Institute.

It was 1986 when Cees Michielsen got his start in the world of high tech. At the time, he joined the Philips EMT team, which would later become Assembleon and finally Kulicke & Soffa, to help build SMD placement robots. “Back then, our main customers were automotive companies like Ford, GM and Chrysler. We were completely self-contained and had all the essential disciplines and competencies in our business unit,” Michielsen recalls.

Then he entered the team, Michielsen’s focus was on technical informatics, but early on, the trajectory of his career took a detour. “It was there at Philips that I started to develop into a systems thinker, and really got away from my own software discipline,” expresses Michielsen. “In hindsight, I can say that was the best start for me in my career; the experience gave me an enormous head start and is why I’m still so passionate about it today.”

“It was there at Philips that I started to develop into a systems thinker, and really got away from my own software discipline,” expresses Cees Michielsen.

Now, after more than three decades in the industry, Michielsen is spending his days as a requirements engineer at ASML, as well as an instructor at High Tech Institute where he shares his knowledge, and his many lessons learned, with the next generation of engineers in the “Systems requirements engineering improvement” training.

Abstraction layers

In systems requirements engineering, especially at the system level, scoping the problem is the name of the game. It’s about determining exactly what functions the system should have, the specific properties that are tied to those functions and accurately defining the problem being solved. “If we’re, for instance, talking about projecting patterns on wafers, you can imagine that’s the main function of the system, and several companies might be doing the same thing. But it’s the properties of this function that distinguish one group from its competitors – the accuracy, yield, speed and reliability,” highlights Michielsen.

For Michielsen, it’s these characteristics that make all the difference in the world, and requirements engineering is the art of identifying the right functions and quantifying their properties to define the problem. “Once the problem is well-defined, finding the solution is much easier,” Michielsen points out. “But you’re not going to find the implementation of your solution straightaway, so you’re probably going to go through a number of abstraction or decomposition layers.”

Cascade

During his training session, Michielsen explains that, in a system, the highest layer of abstraction is the level with the most general requirements, ie the system needs to be fast or have a certain look. But as you go down deeper into the system, it gets much more detailed. Suddenly, the layers are referring to different subjects or using different languages to express the requirements, which can be a little tricky for engineers to keep the information flowing.

“That’s the real objective of requirements engineering, finding different ways to ensure that the data continues to cascade from top to bottom and from stakeholder needs to implementation, all without losing any information,” suggests Michielsen. “I think if I were to summarize the challenge for requirements engineering, I would say that it lies mainly in the cascading of information throughout each abstraction or decomposition layer.”

Quantification

According to Michielsen, one very important part of the method is to find the complete set of requirements for a system. “The question quickly becomes, ‘when is the set complete?’”, he poses. “The best approach we’ve seen so far can be expressed using an equation, which we share in the training. It allows us to fully define a system by its functions, properties and constraints, and can be applied from the highest levels to the components and parts at the lowest points.” He continues, “By specifying and quantifying these criteria, the true requirements can be derived. This is one of the main steps of the training, learning how to put a value on each of the properties of the system.”

“Once the goals are defined, we can identify solutions – design options – based on assumed capabilities of subsystems. This is where creativity leads the product development process, as many different options are considered for solving the problem,” Michielsen depicts. “As long as we document the assumptions that are made during that creative design process, we can later translate these assumptions into requirements for the lower-level subsystems that we need in the solution.”

Justification

To Michielsen, this is one of the most powerful elements of the whole method. The ability to see the complete line of logic from a quantified system definition to the design decisions and finally to the specific implementation of a solution. That is, if engineers are able to maintain coherence between system requirements, system design and system decisions – a crucial factor.

“As long as the information feeds properly, we can derive requirements for the next layer and continue the cascade. That way we can ensure that whatever requirements we end up with at the lowest component level, through our method and our traceability, we can exactly come to the justification of each requirement and each decision made throughout each layer. That’s the whole essence of the method.”

“As a trainer, I want to help instill confidence in the process”, says Michielsen.

After more than 30 years in the industry, what do you most want to share in your trainings?

“As a trainer, I want to help instill confidence in the process. Following the method is one way to achieve that, because the students get the feeling that the system can be complete, consistent and correct – in terms of specifications. That can really help it feel less daunting. Once you cross that hurdle, the students can almost immediately start determining the main functions of the system and decide what properties are related and which constraints apply at that level. By quantifying these aspects, they don’t just state that the system should be reliable, they say explicitly just how reliable the system should be.”

Lessons Learned

With his 30+ years in process architecting, Michielsen has developed several practical methods to keep the information flowing from layer to layer. His success in the field opened the door for him to work with top Dutch and European companies, like Prorail, Eurocontrol, Punch Powertrain and Vanderlande – and several others, to help establish and implement processes for their own requirements engineering programs. “What I found was that there are enormous differences between each company, especially in implementation,” recollects Michielsen. “When I went to work for DAF, we put in place a complete requirements engineering process in three years’ time. We could successfully train hundreds of engineers and the method was paying off.”

Noting the success of the DAF project, Siemens called to lure Michielsen to Germany to help establish the same approach for Daimler. “It was a huge step for me to be invited to implement the system, but it quickly became clear that the approach we developed at DAF wasn’t going to be transferrable to Daimler,” Michielsen calls to mind. “Daimler was just organized in a completely different manner, with responsibilities being spread among departments and people in a way that made successful execution really difficult. The inability to get something going there was disappointing,” he says, continuing, “It certainly was a big learning experience for me, and it came with a lot of tough lessons learned.”

Are these lessons learned what drives you in this domain?

“In part, yes. I have an enormous passion for this whole process. I want to help improve product capabilities and productmanufacturing capabilities, especially in the area where I live and work. I want to make an impact on industry in that sense because we’ve learned so much and I want to spread this information,” emphasizes Michielsen. “It’s not all my doing, it’s all the companies I’ve worked for and all my experiences. I’m extremely grateful for being able to do that, and I’d like to spread that knowledge to make sure that the entire ecosystem can benefit, and we grow from it.”

This article is written by Collin Arocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

After a lot of preparation and sometimes a bit of fiddling, the time has come. In the last couple of weeks Wendy Luiten was practicing her first remote Cooling of Electronics training with her cat Okkie as the first participant. “Of course I’m regularly in team meetings but providing a training is something else”. As of today the online edition starts.

Credits: Martine Raaijmakers

Wendy already gained experience with online training two days after the lock down. “I heard on Tuesday at 8 a.m. that Philips employees had to work from home. On Thursday was the last day of the already running Green Belt training at Philips. So we immediately switched to online on  Teams. At that time I had two advantages: I knew the students and they were used to online meetings via Teams”.

This week is different. The eight participants of “Electronics cooling thermal design” don’t know each other and some of them didn’t use Teams before.

Wendy’s unconcerned about potential problems. She sees tooling and in particular Microsoft’s applications as a natural phenomenon. “It is working and then we’re happy, sometimes it is not working” she says. “In my experience, the ancestor Skype always worked. Teams is more recent, but meanwhile widely deployed everywhere. In the US there are clusters of universities and schools on the educational version. I have no reason to believe that it will cause problems this week. It’s a trial run, there are always areas for improvement, and you won’t find out until you try.

In order to make the material suitable for online modules, Wendy went through all files again. The slides, the practice exercises, the case study. “From a distance, the storyline and story telling becomes more important, because you can’t see exactly how the material lands,” she says. Incidentally, Wendy isn’t going to use the special version of Teams for Education. “That doesn’t add any value for me or the participants. With the educational version, people get an email address and access to share-point, among other things. Students then have to work with user aliases and so on. This puts a burden on IT that you don’t want for a few days of training”.

Credits: Martine Raaijmakers

About the preparation of the participants: High Tech Institute’s partner for electronics courses Hans Vink personally approached all cooling participants three weeks ago. After all, everyone knows the hassle when you end up in a new video conferencing environment with a group for the first time. Do you see me! How do I mute my microphone? These kinds of things. Hans wanted to avoid that at the Team sessions. By the way, we looked at a whole bunch of potential video tools with the High Tech Institute team, but more about that later.

For some clients, Teams is the standard application for meetings, but for others it’s not , so they participate via their web browser. Hans asked all participants whether or not they use Teams and then did a test session with everyone via app or browser to check the settings and to see if all facilities work as needed in the course.

All preparations – don’t hesitate to say: also a lot of extra work – now provide an up beat vibe. Based on the feedback, Hans expects that we will be able to organise online courses every year, as well as the classroom course. “That wouldn’t surprise me”, he says, “We already have sufficient participants for the classroom course in mid-November”.

With that, Wendy’s satisfied too. She regularly receives training requests from all over the world. Offering online modules lowers the threshold to train technology professionals from for example Silicon Valley or India.

This blog is part of a series in which we share our first experiences with online training. 

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Academics who are experts in control theory often have difficulty in designing a controller for industrial practice. On the other hand, many mechatronics professionals who come into contact with control technology lack the theoretical basis to bring their systems to optimum performance. The Motion Control Tuning training offers a solution for both target groups. “Once you’ve gone all the way through it, you can design a perfect control system yourself in just a few minutes,” says course leader Tom Oomen.

How do you ensure that a probe microscope scans a sample in the right way with its nanodial needle? How can a pick and place machine put parts on a circuit board in a flash while still achieving super precision? How can a litho scanner project chip patterns at high speed and just the right position on a silicon wafer? It’s all about control engineering, about motion control.

It’s this knowledge that’s in the DNA of the Brainport region. Motion control is at the heart of accuracy and high performance. The success of Dutch high tech is partly due to the control technology knowledge built up around the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

Technological developments at the Philips divisions Natlab and Centrum voor Fabricagetechnologie (CFT) made an important contribution to the development of the control technology field in the eighties and nineties. Time and time again, however, there was a hurdle to be overcome. When engineers in the product divisions started working with it, it was not so easy to convert the technology and theoretical principles that had been developed into industrial systems.

Students work with a very simple two-mass-spring-damper system.

Training courses Advanced Motion Control and Advanced Feedforward & Learning Control

That is why Philips realised in the 1990s that it had to transfer its knowledge effectively. This resulted in a course structure with a very practical approach. The short training courses of at least three days are intensive, but when participants return to work, they can apply the knowledge immediately.

Motion Control Tuning (MCT) was one of the first control courses set up at Philips CFT in the 1990s by Maarten Steinbuch, currently professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. Today, Mechatronics Academy develops and maintains the MCT training and markets it in collaboration with High Tech Institute, together with the Advanced Motion Control and Advanced Feedforward & Learning Control training courses.

MCT trainer Tom Oomen

Tom Oomen, associate professor at Steinbuch’s section Control Systems Technology of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, is one of the driving forces behind these three courses. “The field is developing rapidly,” says Oomen, “which means a lot of theory, but the basis, for example how to program a PID controller, has remained the same.”

The Motion Control Tuning (MCT) training provides engineers with a solid basis. Participants are often developers with a thorough knowledge of control theory who want to apply their knowledge in practice but encounter practical obstacles. The surprising thing is that each edition always is joined by a number of international participants. It says a lot about how the world views the Dutch expertise in this field.

Motion control training students can roughly be divided into two groups. The first are people with insufficient technical background in control technology, who do have to deal with control technology on a daily basis. They want to learn the basics in order to be able to communicate better with their colleagues. “These people do design controllers, but don’t understand the techniques behind them. They make models for a controller, without knowing exactly what a controller can do. This causes communication problems between system designers and control engineers,” says Oomen.

Control engineers traditionally design a good controller on the basis of pictures, the so-called Bode and Nyquist-diagrams. “For seasoned control engineers, those diagrams are a piece of cake, but if you’ve never learned to read those figures, it’s still abracadabra. Then you can turn the knobs any way you want, but you’ll never design a good controller”, says Oomen.

Motion Control Tuning features twenty trainers

The best way to teach the essence of the profession to people with insufficient theoretical backgrounds, according to TNO’s Gert Witvoet, is to drag them all the way through it once. Witvoet, who also serves as a part-time assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, is one of the twenty trainers and supervisors involved in the MCT training. “They have to learn how to read such diagrams. They need to understand exactly what they mean. With this training you really learn how control engineers in the industry design controllers, and what the possibilities and limitations of feedback are,” says Witvoet.

The other target group consists of engineers who are theoretically prepared. They are trained in theoretical control technology and have a good background, including knowledge of the underlying mathematics. Most of them are international participants, who come to the Netherlands especially for the motion control training. “These people have moved from academia to industry but have often never designed a controller for an industrial system. They are unable to achieve a good performance with modern tools, and the ability to tune classic PID controllers is often lacking,’ says Oomen. Witvoet: “In our course they will learn the real industry practice: how to handle a motion system and come to a good design step by step.”

Tom Oomen says that he looks with ‘theorical glasses’. Witvoet is more the applications guy. Both of them think it’s cool to teach engineers how to put the knowledge from state-of-the-art research transfer it into practice.

The academic world and industry work in very different ways, although their starting point is the same: a model. Researchers and engineers, however, each choose a different approach. Academics often use physical models including underlying mathematics, differential equations and the like. But in practice, engineers work with so-called non-parametric models such as frequency response functions. “This is very different from what we work with in the scientific world and we will work with it in the training”, says Oomen.

Tom Oomen.

MCT training part one is feedback design

Motion control tuning students get started with frequency response functions on the first day. They are quick and easy to obtain and are a means to reach the goal: to design a feedback controller. They measure the properties and characteristics of an existing mechatronic system. “A frequency response function follows from these measurements, which shows how the machine behaves,” says Oomen. “Then a model rolls out, which allows you to design a controller for that system.”

In contrast to these rapidly acquired and highly accurate frequency response models, many techniques from academia build a parametric model. For that they need detailed information on masses, springs, stiffness, dampers and so on. In practice, this is far too time-consuming. It is difficult to know all the parameters exactly.

But if you have an existing system, a frequency response is a good alternative. “You offer a suitable signal and simply measure how the system reacts,” says Witvoet. “This way you get a super good frequency response function of the input-output behaviour in just a few minutes, which allows you to design a good controller. If you then also know how to tune such a thing, you can make the best controller for your system, step by step, within a few minutes.”

Students in MCT training use a simple, practical system

Students get started with a very simple two-mass-spring-damper system. One mass is connected directly to the motor, the second mass (the load) is connected to the first mass. The system has position sensors at the motor, as well as at the load. The challenge is to design a controller that controls the second mass accurately. Not easy, because the shaft is torsional.

Oomen: “In practice, systems always measure the load. Just look at a printer. Somewhere there is a motor that moves the carriage via a drive belt. Because you want to know exactly where the ink is on the paper, you measure the position of the carriage. When you measure on the engine, you never know for sure, because the transmission between the engine and the print head is flexible.”

Gert Witvoet.

Even seasoned researchers in the control technology sometimes have trouble understanding the stubborn practice. In their experience, everything can be modelled in detail, including the transmission between engine and load. During visits to top international groups, Oomen regularly shows the experimental set-up from the motion control tuning training to theorists. “I then ask them if it makes any difference where I measure, at the motor or the load. Starting from theoretical concepts like controllability and observability, they usually answer that it doesn’t matter”.

In the MCT course, however, the trainers show that it is essential where you measure. “If you measure over the motor, then the sky is the limit in terms of performance. Everything is possible. Malfunctions can be suppressed up to any frequency. But if you measure – as always in practice – over the load, then you are very limited, because you have to deal with unpredictable behavior due to flexible parts. Then there are significant limitations for control loops and the performance that you can actually achieve. If you want to make a stabilizing regulator under these conditions, you have to be very careful. It’s easy to get unstable behavior. If you want to know exactly what that’s like, you have to come to the course,” laughs Oomen.

Henry Nyquist and Hendrik Bode

To give a motion controller stability, classic concepts are necessary. These were devised by Henry Nyquist and Hendrik Bode. Oomen: “In the first half of the last century, Nyquist already devised principles to guarantee the stability of such a control loop. I recently read a book from 1947 in which he described this. We still use this on a daily basis, in combination with those frequency response functions. Both are deeply interwoven. In this way we guarantee the stability of control loops.”

Mention the name Nyquist, and you’re also talking about Fourier and Laplace transformations. It might sound complicated but working with mathematics in practice doesn’t require a deep understanding. “We explain these concepts in a very intuitive way that is accessible to everyone,” says Oomen. “The role of these concepts in control design forms the basis and is encountered by control engineers in their work anyway. We think it’s important that people really know it, but it’s really not necessary to go deep into mathematics for that.”

After the basic concepts, the training makes the step to stability. Witvoet: “They learn to lay a good foundation with a picture, a Nyquist diagram. This allows students to test the stability of their system. All mysticism is then gone, because they know what’s underneath and how to use it. Students will then be able to turn the knobs and check whether the closed control loop is stable.”

This is followed by the step to an actual design. The first requirement of such a design may be stability, but in the end, it is all about performance. To achieve this, students are given a wide range of motion control tools such as notch, lead, lag filters and PID controllers. “It’s all in the engineer’s toolbox and it’s the prelude to one of the most appreciated afternoons of the course – the loop-shaping game. In this game, students will tune the controller as well as possible and squeeze out the performance. If they can do that, they’ll have mastered how a feedback controller works.”

MCT training part two is feedforward controller design

In addition to the feedback controller for stability and interference suppression, each motion system also has a feedforward controller. This tells the system how to follow its path from a to b. This is also called reference tracking. “You control that with the feedforward controller,” says Oomen. “The most important part of the system’s performance comes from the feedforward control. Here, too, we briefly go into the theory and then immediately start experimenting. It is a very systematic and intuitive approach. Once you’ve done it, you can apply it immediately.”

By actually applying it, participants in the MCT training learn how things like mass feedforward and capture feedforward work. “It’s a very systematic approach that allows you to tune the parameters one by one in an optimal way,” says Oomen. “If you master that technique, you can tune the best feedforward controller for your system in just a few minutes, by doing iterative experiments.

Once you know how to measure a frequency response function and design a feedback and feedforward control, you can design controllers very quickly. Oomen: “Time is money, of course, and that’s why the entire Dutch high-tech industry does it this way. You can find it in Venlo at Canon Printing Systems and in Best at Philips Healthcare. The smaller mechatronic companies also use these techniques. At ASML in Veldhoven, almost all motion controllers in wafer scanners are tuned in this way. Once you are a little experienced, you can almost get the optimal performance out of the system. That’s within a few minutes and, of course, that’s cool.”

MCT training is 100 percent practice

When asked about the relationship between theory and practice, Oomen laughingly says that the MCT training is “100 percent practice”. “All the theory we do is essential to practice,” adds Witvoet. “We explain a number of theoretical concepts, but we do so by means of an application. It’s all about tuning. It’s really a design course and gradually one learns some theory. Every afternoon we work on that system, making frequency response functions and then fine tuning. Feedforward, feedback, it’s a daily job getting your hands dirty and your feet in the mud, because you apply the theory right away.”

After five days, participants will be able to develop a feedback and feedforward controller independently. In the final day various trainers and experts discuss the developments within their field of expertise.

Oomen: “Within the five days, participants succeed in making controllers with one input and one output, but many industrial systems have multiple inputs and outputs. That seems to have consequences for tuning.” Witvoet: “We show where the dangers lie. When things can go wrong and when things go wrong, how to deal with them.”

To design control systems for multiple inputs and outputs, motion control engineers need a stronger theoretical basis. This knowledge of multivariable systems is discussed in the five-day Advanced Motion Control training course. “In this course, participants will learn in great detail how to make control systems with multiple inputs and outputs”, says Oomen, “We will follow the same philosophy and reasoning as in the Motion Control Tuning training”.

On the last day, learning from data is also discussed, a trend that is currently growing rapidly within the control area. “The latest generations of control systems can learn from past mistakes and at the same time correct them,” says Oomen. “In doing so, we use large amounts of data produced by sensors in machines. This enables us to correct machine faults within a few iterations. This paves the way for new revolutionary machine designs that are lightweight, more accurate, less expensive and more versatile, but also allow existing machines to be upgraded in this way. On the last day of MCT, I’ll tell you about it for an hour, but in the Advanced Feedforward Control training course, we’ll take three days to do it.”

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Nico Meijerman joined NTS to help build and expand the company’s software competency. Shortly after arriving at the hardware stronghold, he started to work on bridging the gap between software engineering and the worlds of physics, mechanics and hardware-related disciplines. The result is a workshop in which Meijerman teaches his non-software colleagues the basics of software engineering. Customer and business specifics included.

First-tier supplier NTS Group has quietly been shaping its software engineering competence over the last couple of years. You might not expect this from a company that’s still making most of its money by bending sheet steel, milling parts and assembling systems.

However, embracing software expertise is a natural step for some first-tier suppliers. Over the past decades, NTS has been actively building its system development capabilities. It now develops and manufactures complete machines and modules that are branded and marketed by its customers. With the value of end products shifting to software, it seems a natural move for NTS to develop the competences to catch the digitization wave.

NTS’ Development and Engineering (D&E) department has a headcount of about two hundred engineers, of which 15 percent focus on software. For a supplier that delivers high-end systems and designs, this is still on the low side, Meijerman argues. “It will grow because we see software becoming more and more essential for creating value for our customers. We see the software effort increasing in our projects.”

“We see the software effort increasing in our projects”, says Nico Meijerman. 

An intriguing offer

Meijerman has been walking the hardware-software trail for his entire career. He learned to design chips during his study in Twente and joined Sagantec, a company that both worked on a silicon compiler and developed application-specific ICs for customers. There, he started designing chips, but soon enough, he shifted to programming because the embedded software turned out to take more effort than the hardware itself.

Later, Meijerman taught informatics-related subjects at several departments of the university of applied sciences (HTS) in Arnhem. Subsequently, he joined Philips CFT, where they needed a software engineer who understood what was happening in the mechanical and electrical domains. There, he developed motion control software for ASML’s first PAS 5500 litho scanners. Soon after, he also worked on MRI scanners for Philips Healthcare.

In 2010, Meijerman decided it was time to start his own consultancy company but a few years later, NTS approached him with an intriguing offer: would he be interested in becoming the group leader for machine control, a team focusing on software and electrical engineering. Helping to build up the software competency seemed a daunting, yet very attractive challenge.

After arriving at the hardware stronghold, Meijerman knew he needed to work on his relationship with the NTS mechanics and mechatronics base. He figured a short workshop would help make his new colleagues more familiar with software.

According to Nico Meijerman of NTS, “Mechanical engineers deal with the limitations of physics, software manages complexity.”

Meijerman started interviewing colleagues to get an idea of their needs. First, he talked to the systems engineers – the guys that mostly have a mechanical background. “The most frequent response was that they had no clue about software. I heard remarks like ‘Those guys are always too late’, ‘They never make the things that I really need’ and ‘I can’t work with them because they don’t understand anything’. It was very much a culture of blaming and it was clear that our systems engineers didn’t know what software was doing. They saw it as an unpredictable black box.”

In Meijerman’s contact with the system architects, things started to resonate more. “They at least got an idea about what they would like to know about software. They wanted to know more about programming languages, third-party, multi-tasking, real-time, Agile and other basic concepts. They also wanted to know what a software development process looked like.”

Before long, Meijerman and the system architects concluded that the customer perspective is of enormous importance. “We saw the need to involve clients early in the software development process. For NTS, this was a high priority because most of its customers have a mechanics background. They know that software has to be included but they have to be educated on the specifics – for instance, on the fact that software is never bug-free. That’s why part of my workshop is also about business models and everything that follows our development activities.”

Nico Meijerman is the trainer for ‘Software engineering for non-software engineers’. 

Wrong assumptions

In the high tech industry, you often hear that communication is the problem in settings with different disciplines. But at NTS, Meijerman experienced that it’s more about understanding and being able to step in someone else’s shoes. “People do try to communicate. I see that there’s definitely a willingness to talk,” he says. “But hardware and software engineers are often living in completely different worlds.”

Meijerman explains that mechanical engineers predominantly look at the limitations of physics. “It’s about nanometers, about milliseconds. The stiffness of a construction determines what you can achieve. Components wear out if you use them too long.” Software engineers, on the other hand, do not deal with physics; they try to control complexity. “Mechanics is about managing the limits of physics, while software is about managing complexity.”

The problems often arise from wrong assumptions. “Mechanics rarely ask a software engineer about the degree of complexity. That’s why a software engineer will say in most cases he can fix a machine control problem – except for some very difficult issues. But if you ask them how much effort it’s going to take and how complex it is, you may get a completely different answer. A mechanical engineer looks at things from a physics point of view, not from a complexity point of view. But he should know how much work his question can generate. The lack of understanding of such basic concepts makes it difficult to interact. Equally, software engineers definitely have to improve their knowledge in the field of mechanical engineering.”

Part of Meijerman’s workshop is understanding that software engineering isn’t the same as programming. “Youngsters are learning how to program while at university or during technical education. A lot of people think software engineering is just more programming but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In programming, complexity usually isn’t the issue, as you’ll end up with some hundreds of lines of code. It’s not until you’re dealing with over a hundred thousand lines of code that it starts to get complicated. In high-tech systems this is the case: there are sometimes millions of lines of code, and the only way to tackle challenges of this magnitude is to find a way to work through the problem. That means breaking it down and ensuring that your work is correct. Engineering is about focusing on architecture and design, as well as managing complexity.”

“My goal is to teach participants all aspects of software engineering,” Meijerman concludes. “When they realize that, they understand that they can’t ask their nephew playing with Arduino boards to write a program for them over the weekend.” At the end of the workshop, participants understand more about the intriguing world of software engineering and about the differences and commonalities between software engineering and other disciplines, resulting in better collaboration, better solutions and hopefully more fun in their work.

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

From an endless loop of deliberations to receiving criticism that can sound downright rude, when you’re new to the Netherlands, the Dutch work culture can seem totally weird. To help facilitate integration, tech companies are sending their expat workers to the training “How to be successful in the Dutch high tech work culture”.

As an expat in the Netherlands, you’ve probably already learned that transitioning into the high tech work culture in the Netherlands is a difficult adjustment. If you’re new to the region, and you find yourself asking questions like: ‘We’re having another meeting?’ or thinking, ‘Why are they asking me, it’s not my job’ – welcome to the Dutch work culture, one place that’s sure to have you feeling like a square peg, trying to fit into a round hole.

Because this can be such a difficult transition to maneuver, High Tech Institute, together with content partner Settels Savenije & Friedrich, is offering the training “How to be successful in the Dutch high tech work culture”. Here’s your beginner’s guide.

Flat-work society

One of the first things you’ll notice while working as an expat in the Netherlands is that the corporate power structure is typically as flat as a ‘pannenkoek’. The Netherlands isn’t at all into hierarchy. In business, status is nothing, and credibility counts for everything. In the training, participants learn ways to build their reputation by taking ownership and doing what’s necessary to get the job done. They also learn that one of the fastest ways to kill credibility is by being confined to the parameters of a job description.

“If you think you can, then do. Even if it’s not exactly your job. Don’t be limited to only what was asked of you, and don’t be afraid to take a risk,” proposes course instructor, Claus Neeleman. “It’s also important to be honest and own up to mistakes rather than make excuses. It’s always better to be sorry than to do nothing at all.”

Building consensus

Another indicator of the lack of hierarchy in the Netherlands is the need for consensus. One well-known characteristic of the Dutch high tech workplace is the seemingly endless number of meetings and discussions. Do the words, ‘let’s meet again next week to discuss this further’, sound familiar? You’re thinking, how hard could it be to decide, right? For some, this is difficult to acclimate to. Yes, meetings take time and it might appear to be inefficient, but it’s all designed to build consensus – or what the Dutch refer to as, ‘polderen’. “Polderen is simply about everyone doing their part to come to a consensus and make decisions,” explains Neeleman.

His longstanding method is a deeply ingrained cultural value. For centuries, the Netherlands has looked for innovative solutions to confront the threat of water. The lowland mentality is, ‘we’re all on this ship together, so it’s up to everyone to come up with the best possible answer’. Thus, it’s important to participate and give input. It doesn’t matter if you’re an expert, or if you have nothing crucial to add. Your responsibility is simply to be part of the discussion, which is another way to build your credibility. Some issues require out-of-the-box thinking from the non-experts. “Just ask the little boy who put his finger in the dike,” jokes Neeleman. “The idea doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to work.”

One of the many practice rounds during the training.

Communication is key

Because of the sheer number of meetings and interaction in the Dutch work environment, good communication skills are a necessity – both verbal and nonverbal. As such, one of the central themes of the one-day training focuses on communication styles and active listening skills. From body language to facial expressions and tone of voice, participants learn not only how to express themselves more effectively, but they also gain experience in how to pick up on the social cues given by others.

During multiple practice rounds, students learn that good communication skills start with the ability to really hear what someone is saying. For this, trainees are taught a three-step process for active listening. First, listen intently. Second, summarize to display you listened and understand. Finally, ask questions for clarification. While this is simple in theory, cross-cultural communication is not always clear nor easy to understand. For many participants, like Bahaa Ibrahiem – a setup tooling and visualization engineer with ASML – this section of the course was a real eye-opener. Ibrahiem: “After more than a year of living and working in the Netherlands, this training has really improved my cultural awareness and my communication with my Dutch colleagues.”

Kick the ball, not the person

Of course, even with active communication skills, when trying to bring together so many personalities and opinions, inherently there are going to be disagreements. This can sometimes result in the exchange of heated discussions or feedback that seems rather harsh. This sort of critical back and forth can be especially difficult for expats that are new to the workforce in the Netherlands. Culturally speaking, the Dutch don’t mince words and are well-known for their directness. All too often, this can leave a foreign colleague befuddled and entirely insecure with the critique.

Participants are practising to give and receive feedback.

Feedback process

Of course, even with active communication skills, when trying to bring together so many personalities and opinions, inherently there are going to be disagreements. This can sometimes result in the exchange of heated discussions or feedback that seems rather harsh. This sort of critical back and forth can be especially difficult for expats that are new to the workforce in the Netherlands. Culturally speaking, the Dutch don’t mince words and are well-known for their directness. All too often, this can leave a foreign colleague befuddled and entirely insecure with the critique.

“The idea is that feedback shouldn’t be personal. It’s about kicking the ball, not the person,” elucidates Neeleman. “Good feedback is constructive, is to the point and is given simply with the intent to solve a problem.”

This article is written by Collin Arocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

A good configuration management process for creating high tech systems provides cost savings, strength and fully transparent development and production. Frank Ploegmakers, trainer at High Tech Institute, talks about obstacles and common mistakes in configuration management. ‘Those responsible for technology, development and operations are not always able to understand the essence of the Configuration Management complexity.’

Within a high tech organisation, hordes of engineers produce an enormous amount of technical data: partial designs of printed circuit boards, motors, sensors, mechanical and optical components, you name it. Electronics engineers, software designers, optical engineers, mechanical engineers: they all have their own computer tools. Even prototyping itself is shifting to the virtual environment. Remove the design tools from any high tech company and you may as well shut it down.

The discipline of Configuration Management has been developed to control the coherence of all this design information. It ensures that different disciplines can work together on a design, and that the process from design through to the delivered product is controlled.

It is hard to believe, but only a small proportion of high tech machine builders have specified and implemented a configuration management process and method within the appropriate ICT tools. ‘This doesn’t exist in many companies,’ says Frank Ploegmakers, trainer in product configuration management at High Tech Institute. ‘Configuration management tools are needed to exchange, test, secure, hold and place all design knowledge into a structure. I think that only a small proportion of machine builders have documented their development and manufacturing processes and use them in the correct manner and, for example, understand what baselining is.’

‘Understanding complexity is a prerequisite for configuration management,’ says Frank Ploegmakers, lecturer in system configuration management.

Baselining

To explain what baselining is and to clarify relative issues, let’s take a trip into an ideal world. In this world, ingenious mechanics, electronics engineers and software engineers deliver perfect partial designs in close consultation. They are – miraculously – all correct first time round. Everyone is happy: that works! We can produce! The person in charge gives the starting signal and the design department draws up a baseline. This defines the machine design in a precise manner: materials, composition, purchasing parts, modules, coherence (think of geometry and quality specifications) and the associated software. Production can get started making the machine and the purchasing department can go ahead and order.

If only it were that simple, sighs every technician. In practice, there are many design layers. Improvement follows improvement. Before you know it, the mechanics department is on version 3, the electronics department on version 6 and the software team on version 4.11. Not a disaster either, since once a baseline has been drawn, the machine has also been defined in detail.

Observing hundreds of small and large improvements

In practice, matters are different. We will continue to make improvements even after ‘drawing up the baseline.’ A component in version number 5 is in the baseline, but the manufacturer has still found something that makes it better or cheaper. Therefore, production will have to take version number 6. Even then, there isn’t a problem, but in practice many technicians and disciplines all work on their own partial design.

Then suddenly there appear to be hundreds of small to large improvements let loose upon a baseline. Which person still maintains the whole overview? Who still knows the relationship between the product or machine at the customer and the baseline within their own organisation? Ploegmakers says: ‘With today’s complex products and systems, you need something that you are able to maintain an overview of, so that it is clear what each person is doing at each precise moment whilst all changes to baselines are completely transparent. A large part of the machine builders have laid out their development and manufacturing processes properly, a small part actually uses them for what they are intended.’

Software

By the way, in software development, configuration management is commonplace everywhere. At the end of a day of development, the engineers in that discipline check in their software code and a build is run: creating the program with all recent additions. Ploegmakers believes that this working method should also be applied by other disciplines. ‘Strangely enough, companies do software configuration management, but they don’t apply it at system level.’

According to Ploegmakers, this is because many companies do not (yet) realise that this is their major problem. ‘If I say to a software manager: “I am now removing your software configuration system,” he will panic completely, because then he will no longer be able to carry out his software output. But in most product or machine building organisations there are employees at a higher level who have to watch over multidisciplinary system integration with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of components, whilst in the case in question, they don’t. When I talk to software people about it, they say to me: ‘Frank, you’ve just touched a raw nerve.’

Time stamps

A complicating factor is the time between drawing up the baseline and a working machine. With software everyone sees the result the next morning, but with hardware it takes months. With a high chance that changes will slip through that have not been coordinated with everyone.

You prevent that by using a configuration management system, says Ploegmakers. ‘With this system you create complete transparency. The power of baselining is that the entire company works with the baseline. Everyone can see the development and production situation at any given point in time.’

Ploegmakers compares it to a film. ‘You can rewind the entire history. You create time stamps. You simply see a historical development of your product with all the associated benefits. It can be useful to look back at baselines and it is also nice for the customer. You can recall the precise configuration if the client places an additional order.’

Trainer Frank Ploegmakers has seen more than a hundred companies ‘on the inside.’

Background and practical experience

Via LTS, MTS and HTS mechanical engineering, Frank ended up reading Engineering and Construction Informatics at Eindhoven University of Technology (nowadays Technology Management faculty). Half of that was hard technology and the other half economics, business administration, marketing, philosophy and social psychology. He came into contact with virtual reality and witnessed the first wave of automation and its excesses: major IT projects that went wild. In this way he became interested in how you ensure that information technology actually delivers something to a company.

By organising a study trip to China, Frank got his first job. He started at WAIDE Consultants in the mid-nineties. This company advised Dutch companies on Joint Ventures to gain access to the Chinese market. Great projects and a great experience, but it was not technical enough for Frank and after a year and a half he started working at Philips Display Components.

For five years, he and his design support department focused on the further optimisation of picture tube design processes and tools. In addition, the field of product data management (PDM) rose strongly in the late nineties. ‘This involved recording and jointly using worldwide information about the display tubes, the production process and production machines. This had to be properly supported by PDM automation.’

Ploegmakers used much of what he learned at Philips Components at Assembleon, manufacturer of pick and place machines. There, his field of work expanded to the entire creation process: from product creation to logistics, production, delivery and service.

After his Philips days, for four years Ploegmakers worked at engineering firm Irmato Group as director of sales and operations. Together with his team, he helped the company grow from 20 to 135 employees. He learnt a lot on the job. ‘We built everything from scratch.’ In 2008, after four years of Irmato, Ploegmakers started working at various companies as an interim manager and project manager. He has now seen more than a hundred companies on the inside.

Insight and overview

Configuration management is not a problem for IT, the reliability department or the R&D department, emphasises Ploegmakers. ‘This goes beyond all departments, from the CTO to the factory floor.’ He believes the real problem often lies with the leadership. ‘Those responsible for technology, development and operations are not always able to understand the essence of the configuration management complexity. Organisations can deliver beautiful configurations of products and machines to customers, but the internal control of these configurations often leaves something to be desired. Business leaders often fail to see that this leads to enormous inefficiencies and ineffectiveness.’

Managing and automating business processes starts with the insight into one’s own company and a good overview of the complexity. ‘It starts with a good company model. Many managers are unable to set that up with all teams. But it is necessary if you want to achieve complex products or machines together with a large organisation. If your product and your company become more complex, a simple method to manage the configuration process is essential.’ Once that process and the associated working methods are known, the introduction of the required information technology is easy. ‘Then it can be configured in PDM and ERP systems in no time at all.’

Doesn’t Ploegmakers paint a somewhat rather too rosy picture with this last statement? ‘No,’ he affirms. ‘The difficult thing is to first understand the complexity. That is an absolute condition for doing configuration management. The implementation of the underlying details is then simple. The old adage “organise first, automate second” still applies.’

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Vacuums seem simple: you pump out the air until you reach the desired low pressure. However, for a high vacuum, simply pumping out the air is not enough. To achieve this, you must take extreme measures. For many engineers though, this topic doesn’t always come naturally. High Tech Institute teaches them the tricks of the trade.

More and more, processes in the high-tech industry require a highly controlled environment. Consider the electron microscopes from Thermo Fisher or the EUV systems from ASML. If you insert air into their systems, electron beams are scattered and the EUV light gets absorbed. Therefore, a high vacuum is an absolute necessity. Contamination is also a product killer in the production of displays. Any amount of moisture in the air would prove to be disastrous for OLED materials and the display would be a total loss.

The bar is getting higher and higher. “As long as I can remember, the pressure in electron microscopes should not exceed 10-10 mbar,” says Mark Meuwese, vacuum specialist at Settels Savenije Van Amelsvoort. “But the requirements are also becoming stricter in other applications. For example, soft x-ray systems used to be able to deal with 10-3 mbar. Nowadays, 10-7 is the new standard. With increasing accuracies, come more sensitive sensors that are more susceptible to pollution or disturbance by the atmosphere present.”

Mark Meuwese is involved in the 4-day training ‘Basics and design principles for ultra-clean vacuum‘. 

“The fuller you build your vacuum system, the greater the chance of contamination,” says Mark Meuwese of Settels Savenije Van Amelsvoort. Up to 10-8 mbar, it’s all relatively simple, Meuwese knows. “Of course, you still have to work hard, but if you want to go even further, the challenges increase exponentially, and the system will be many times more expensive. A water molecule is a dipole and therefore sticks to surfaces. You can pump it off better if you put enough energy into it. The easiest method for this is to heat the vacuum chamber. But by creating a temperature distribution, you introduce the risk that the evaporated elements will settle on cold surfaces, in the worst case on the sensor, the samples or the product. Moreover, many sensor systems cannot withstand high temperatures. 10-8 mbar is the limit at which everything goes well.”

Meuwese does not expect that the bulk of the applications will require lower pressures in the foreseeable future. The requirements can get stricter for specialized research work. “The limit is at 10-12 – 10-13, I estimate. And for that, you can hardly build a machine. Everything you introduce into the vacuum chamber is too much. The vessel and the pressure sensor are already too polluting, and even the most advanced pump leaks too much back into the system.”

Fingerprint

At its base, vacuum technology is simple. It starts with a vessel to which you connect a pump. You continue to pump air out until the pressure reaches the desired level. In practice, such a system is of little use. After all, you want to carry out processes in that vacuum. So, everything has to be in the vessel. In fact: you often want the space you are working in to be full of mechanics, sensors and other components. How can you build a vacuum chamber and still achieve a good vacuum level? This is one of the things you learn at an intensive training like “Basics & design principles for ultra-clean vacuum” of High Tech Institute.

“The more components you put in, the greater the chance of contamination,” says Meuwese, one of the teachers during the training. “The surface alone causes contamination through outgassing, and everything you place in the vessel means more surface, and therefore more outgassing. You have to pay attention to that.”

How can you take a vacuum environment into account in your design? “There are a number of do’s and don’ts that we cover during the training. To begin with, there is, of course, a list of materials that are suitable for vacuum. Stainless steel is really good and you can also use aluminum without any problems. Brass, however, is not suitable because it contains zinc that evaporates at 300 degrees at 10-3 mbar. Many companies have a list of materials and coatings its engineers are allowed to use.”

Rust is also out of the question because it is porous and contains water that gasses out – meaning a proper brushing is the way of life. “A simple fingerprint can make you suffer for weeks. There are a surprisingly large number of molecules in a fingerprint, so it takes a long time before everything is gone. And there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to pump it out at all,” says Meuwese. Proper cleaning is a profession in its own right and is discussed extensively during training. Since fat is a no-no, ball bearings are a no-go. Designers have to rely heavily on elastic elements such as leaf springs and cross-spring hinges. “Or on ball bearings with ceramic balls, or fully ceramic bearings, since they do not need any lubricant.”

Little legs

Designers must also pay close attention to the shape and construction of the components. “For example, they should avoid sharp edges. If you polish it with a cotton swab or a cloth, remnants will get caught up in it,” Meuwese explains. “A bolt in a blind hole traps a volume of air. If you empty the barrel, it will leak out. Remember that the gas law states that pV/T is constant. If you want to reach 10-7 mbar, that small volume becomes ten orders larger. “Potholes are annoying because water remains in them after rinsing. “So blind holes are also to be avoided. And if you drill a hole to let the water out, it should not be too small. Due to the capillary action, the water will otherwise remain in the hole.’

If you use electrical discharge machining to create a part, there must not be any right angles in the pattern. “That is a different way of thinking. It is not about the most efficient design, but about preventing edges and corners. You have to curve everything and that is always a challenge. With some common sense and experience, you will eventually work it out.”

Even connecting two components in a vacuum is not straightforward. The surfaces are never flat enough to make them fit perfectly. A gap always remains – no matter how small – where air or contaminants are trapped. For the vacuum pump it is more convenient if you separate the two parts with little legs. Half a millimeter will often suffice.

Fat is a no-no in a vacuum, so moving is done with elastic elements.

Cheating

The training of High Tech Institute in the past was mainly about vacuum technology. In recent years, more attention has been paid to ultraclean. “Vacuum is easier to understand; you pump until you reach the desired pressure,” says Meuwese. “For ultraclean, that is just the first step. Afterwards, you fill the barrel again with a “clean” gas, which, for example, no longer contains any water. But how can you backfill without polluting the barrel again? Nowadays, we also deal with that challenge during the course.”

For a designer, there is little distinction between vacuum or ultraclean. The biggest difference is in the thermal properties. In a vacuum, heat transfer is very bad because there is no conductive medium. Which means no convection and no conduction, only radiation and you need a large temperature difference for that. “In vacuum, therefore, everything becomes hot by definition,” Meuwese knows. “Cooling can be done through closed channels with water, along and through the components. Or by making a thermal connection to a cold part of the system. There are also complex alternatives such as a helium backfill solution where you apply local low pressure with molecules that can transfer heat. Actually, that is cheating,” Meuwese says with a smile.

“A vacuum is more thermally challenging than ultraclean”, says Mark Meuwese.

Sense

The growing importance of vacuum technology and ultraclean means that more and more engineers must be aware of the matter. Meuwese observes that although the level across the board is rising, there is still much to be gained. “Most people who come from college or university have a sense of technology. They sense that a thick I-profile beam can take more weight than a thin I-beam. They have much less of a natural sense for vacuum. If I tell someone that I can evaporate 1015 molecules within a certain time and there are 1018, I am a factor of a thousand off, but they don’t know what that means. A vacuum is more abstract than mechanics. Mbar liters per second: it does not ring a bell for many engineers.”

Schools nowadays are paying more attention to the subject. Certainly, in the Eindhoven region, more and more students master the basic knowledge. “Coincidentally, I now have a student from Enschede, and it is less widely represented there. More on the University of Twente, but much less at higher professional education. It is also closely related to the Eindhoven region, but something like vapor deposition is used all over the world and you need vacuum knowledge for that. ”

This article is written by Alexander Pil, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Ad Vermeer holds 45 patents, has more than two decades of experience in the high-tech industry—and just as much persuasive power. After holding positions at Assembleon, ASML, and Philips CFT, he made a deliberate move into the startup world in 2009. There, he worked as a systems architect for four technology-driven companies. Two of them have since been successfully sold: Solaytec (atomic layer deposition) to Tempress and Liteq (back-end lithography) to Kulicke & Soffa.

Today, Vermeer works at Cerescon, a startup specializing in automated asparagus harvesting, and consults for Additive Industries in the field of metal 3D printing systems. The conversation focuses on system architecture, breakthrough technologies—and why well-designed workshops are often more effective than traditional leadership.

Big leaps instead of small steps
Vermeer is regarded as a passionate innovator—and as someone who not only develops new technologies but also successfully brings them to market. He considers cautious, purely incremental steps to be risky.
“When you have a true breakthrough technology in your hands, you can’t play it safe,” he says. “The leap can’t be big enough.”

This mindset has been a recurring theme throughout his career. According to Vermeer, system architecture becomes much more critical, especially in the startup environment.
“You don’t have any room to maneuver. You can’t just throw in another five million euros. Every investment must be justified—with a story that convinces existing and new investors.”

Learning as a Strategic Tool
A couple of time a year, Vermeer teaches the five-day System Architecture (Sysarch) course. He can hardly spare any more time for teaching—but he doesn’t want to give it up.

He makes targeted use of this training experience in his daily work at Cerescon. Whenever teams threaten to get stuck, he organizes workshops. This is not only effective from a professional standpoint, but also crucial for motivation and long-term retention of talent.
“We can’t pay the salaries of the big high-tech corporations. So young engineers need to feel that they’re developing professionally—and that they’re significantly more valuable after a year.”

Storytelling as a System Test
During one of these workshops, the topic of storytelling came up—a thought exercise from the Sysarch training. In this exercise, teams consciously put themselves in the customer’s shoes and tell the story of the product as it is used in real life.

“We imagined our machine leaving the factory, being transported to the customer, and operating smoothly there,” Vermeer recalls.
“Suddenly, everyone got nervous. It was immediately clear to us: As things stood, it wasn’t going to work that way.”

The storytelling sparked an intense discussion—and led to a surprising realization: The real bottleneck wasn’t with the engineers, but in the use of the test setups. While all the machines were being modified at the same time, no equipment was available for integration testing for weeks on end.

Identify bottlenecks—and resolve them effectively
The subsequent analysis showed that the real bottleneck was software testing time.
“You have to organize throughput at the bottleneck as efficiently as possible,” says Vermeer. “Eliyahu Goldratt described this decades ago in his Theory of Constraints.”

As a result, Cerescon introduced so-called “machine sponsors”—following ASML’s example. Each is responsible for an entire test machine, coordinates test requests from various projects, and schedules the limited machine time as efficiently as possible.
“In my experience as a leader, there’s hardly anything that has a greater impact than workshops like these,” says Vermeer.

What Makes a True Invention
For Vermeer, inventing is not a mystical process, but rather structured, methodical work.
“Some people believe you stumble upon a good idea by chance. That’s not how it works,” he says. “I can invent on command.”

A key moment for him was discovering the TRIZ method developed by Russian inventor Genrich Altshuller.
“When I read about it, I thought: That’s exactly how I do it, too.”
Creativity requires talent, he says, but above all, it requires self-confidence.
“I’m arrogant enough to say: I can invent anything you could possibly want. And after 35 years of experience, I’m starting to believe it myself.”

Structuring Wishful Thinking with CAFCR
It is even more difficult to actually change the market with a new technology than it is to invent it.
“That’s wishful thinking. Formulating such a wish precisely is extremely challenging.”

Here, Vermeer relies on the CAFCR method, which examines system architecture from five perspectives: Customer, Application, Functional, Conceptual, and Realization. The goal is to clearly identify the actual customer benefits.

At Cerescon, it was relatively simple: Vermeer’s brother has been an asparagus farmer for 25 years.
“He knew exactly what the value drivers were. He put it simply: ‘You should be able to see the asparagus underground.’ That made it clear: Underground detection is the breakthrough.”

In training sessions, Vermeer has participants identify these value drivers on their own. In addition to yield, quality, and costs, a fourth factor emerged that came as a surprise: the growing labor shortage.
“If there’s no one left to harvest the crops, everything else is irrelevant,” says Vermeer.