Ruiskuvalupäivät in Lahti
Muoviyhdistys (the Finnish Plastic Association) organises seminar days annually for professionals in both extrusion and injection moulding technologies. This year I was sent to represent Arcada and project Teknetium in the event. Personally I chose to aim for making new industrial connections and looking for new ways to collaborate, new partners to work with and companies we could possibly visit with students from our Materials Processing programme.
The event turned out to be very fruitful, I learned a lot about injection moulding, and am now eagerly looking forward to participating in the extrusion seminars. I was happy to find that Arcada wasn’t the only education-centered party attending, and it seemed, as always, that plastic processing engineers and professionals are needed and desired for by the industry. I ended up making connections that will surely benefit our students in various ways; in forms of expert guest lectures, and industrial connections made in the future and other materials for teaching and learning.
Fig: The topics relevant to injection moulding cover more than just plastic properties, the smart factories in the 4th industrial revolution are taking over.
The topics covered included industry 4.0, directly applicable to my work in assessing the usability of smart technology to upgrade our processing laboratory – hence upgrading the learning and user experience therein. While our new injection moulding machine is already smart enough, I am still learning…
Fig: A real professional can find a way to connect a cute cat image to any topic…
Maybe in the next year’s injection moulding seminar we will show something just as curious from Arcada as the cat image above..
Maiju Virtanen
Research Engineer
maiju.virtanen@arcada.fi
Svenska Folkskolans Vänner (SFV) is acknowledged for financing project Teknetium.