From home
Collaborations and adaptations during the Coronavirus era
In these times in which the Coronavirus has confined us to our homes, in Mondragon University we have had to adapt to the situation in order to continue with our activity. At the same time, this situation is forcing us to reinvent ourselves.
On the other hand, this crisis that we are experiencing is bringing out the best in all of us and is leading us to collaborate and cooperate with both society and institutions.
Below you can see what we are doing.
Mondragon Unibertsitatea to gather on 1-5 June over 150 experts from 19 countries at the 5th CIRP Conference on Surface Integrity, this time in e-conference format
Mondragon Unibertsitatea to gather on 1-5 June over 150 experts from 19 countries at the 5th CIRP Conference on Surface Integrity, this time in e-conference format
The virtual platform will be hosting about a hundred scientific works related to advanced manufacturing – a strategic area for Mondragon Unibertsitatea and its collaborating companies
Mondragon Unibertsitatea will be organising on 1-5 June the 5th CIRP Conference on Surface Integrity, a congress in which international experts will be debating and presenting their research on advanced manufacturing, particularly on the integrity of surfaces. The meeting had to be reinvented as a consequence of the health alarm generated by COVID-19 and transformed from a face-to-face event into a virtual congress (e-conference), facilitating the participation of researchers from all over the world, since each of them is facing a different health alarm situation.
At the congress organised by Mondragon Unibertsitatea, over a hundred researchers from 19 countries will make their interventions through videos and will present and debate recent scientific advances in the field of surface integrity. The goal is to create an international forum for presenting and exchanging the latest advances in research on the surface integrity generated in components manufactured through advanced manufacturing processes, as it represents a key component to improve the quality of products. During the five days, practical cases will also be examined and functional performance will be evaluated from an industrial point of view.
The congress has the support of the Basque Government, specifically the Department of Education. As proof of this, counsellor Cristina Uriarte has come to Mondragon Unibertsitatea to attend its opening.
The e-conference will allow flexible access to all content during the 5 days, an improved feature compared to a face-to-face congress since, usually, one has to choose among several parallel sessions.
A long history
Mondragon Unibertsitatea has an outstanding track record in research and transfer activities related to advanced manufacturing, as well as a broad network of industrial partners. In this area, the university has worked extensively with ITPAero, with whom it has participated in numerous projects in the Basque Country, Spain and a number of European nations to improve the manufacturing processes of aeronautical components with high added value, for example. Furthermore, the Basque Country represents an appropriate setting to hold a meeting with a focus on advanced manufacturing thanks to its consistent industrial fabric. These reasons have led CIRP – a world organisation specialising in production engineering research – to assign the organisation its 5th edition of the Congress on Surface Integrity to Mondragon Unibertsitatea.
As explained by Pedro Arrazola and Aitor Madariaga, heads of the Congress, the manufacturing processes that are applied during the component-finishing stages modify the properties of the surface layer of the component material (roughness, internal stresses, changes in hardness, modifications in the microstructure of the material, etc.). All these properties define the surface integrity and have a direct impact on the final behaviour of the component, improving or worsening its life cycle, and therefore, resulting in the greater or lesser recyclability, environmental impact, the circular economy, etc.
The Higher Polytechnic School of Mondragon Unibertsitatea will present three research papers at the congress, two from the High-Performance Machining group and one from the Surface Technologies group, in addition to a fourth paper in collaboration with ENISE (the National School of Engineering of Saint-Étienne).
