Hello AMIC!
Kris Czaja, the Composites and Additive Applications Manager at Ingersoll Machine Tools, presented at our AMIC Lunch with Industry Seminar today! Since graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Astronomy w/Math, Physics, Kris has worked at Ingersoll Machine Tools for nearly 11 years. Ingersoll Machine Tools Inc. has been an iconic name in the milling machines sector since its inception in 1891, successfully serving the defense and then the newborn aeronautics/aerospace industry, along with Primary Metals, Energy, and Naval sectors.
Participants gained a deep understanding of the company’s core business, products, services, and engineering challenges interacting with Kris, with a particular focus on the development, training, and application of Ingersoll’s endeavors, including:
- Composite Platforms with “Lights out manufacturing” challenges
- Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) with Thermoplastics
- Polymer for Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology (3D printing)
When asked how his company’s lights out manufacturing platform can potentially put workers out of jobs, he responded, “those advanced systems with sensorzation/digital twin/process planning would liberate many workers from boring tasks, motivating them for highly trained jobs anyway!”
Working with the largest and most advanced aerospace companies in the world, his team got opportunities to oversee a multitude of one-of-a-kind world record-setting projects, which is very inspiring to our students! However, Kris was somewhat mysterious, unwilling to share who the users would be when presenting the world’s largest gantry due to trade secrets.
We appreciate Ingersoll Machine Tools’s interest in UW-Madison College of Engineering and welcome the company to join our AMIC community for deeper collaborations. We thank the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center for sponsoring this inaugural seminar series and our AMIC community members who contributed to this inaugural seminar series. Please visit AMIC’s event calendar for an updated schedule, and see you at our next seminar with our long-term AMIC member NCD technologies in two weeks!