Project Valmet: Designing modularity in 3D fibre technology
The partner
Valmet is a company offering process technology and automation services for the paper, pulp, and energy industries. It is one of the world’s 300 sustainability leaders with over 100 service centres, 96 sales offices, and 39 production units globally.
The challenge
In this project, Valmet's challenge is gaining a good understanding of modularity in all its forms, all aspects of the value chain, and all stages of the product life cycle in 3D fibre technology.
- How to achieve serial producibility at the machine & factory level and a high-level user experience of the 3D fibre machine?
The objective
The main goal of this Aalto Thesis project is to embed modularity into 3D fibre manufacturing, from the levels of machinery and production plants and sales & user experience.
Juhani Salonen, Industrial Designer, ValmetThis work will offer a unique opportunity for making a real difference in the transformation of the industry of sustainable 3D-packaging.
The student team
The student team consists of three Aalto Master’s students from different study fields.
Mohan Chand Gurajala
Industrial Engineering and Management | School of Science
- What are the lead times, throughput, capacity and space utilization for different scenarios like demand variation, machine count and changeovers?
- What are the bottlenecks within the 3D fibre production process?
Efthymios (Themis) Atsaloglou
Human-Computer Interaction Design with Minor in Innovation & Entrepreneurship | School of Science
- Who are the stakeholders involved in the creation and use of the 3D fibre machine service?
- What aspects would be valuable to them?
- What are the valuable aspects that the sales process should focus on?
- How do those valuable aspects translate to the sales process and the generation of tools?
- How efficient would the developed sales tools be?
Zofia Swierczynska
International Design Business Management | School of Technology
- How modular is the technology currently?
- What must be considered when moving from an early design piloting to serial production of actual production lines, from the point of view of machine-level optimization?
- How to implement modularity in all aspects of the production chain and machine lifecycle?
The time frame of this project is March 2021 – November 2021.
Mohan Chand, studentIt is inspiring to be a part of the sustainable-driven innovation. Every time we interact with Valmet, there is something new to learn.
Aalto Thesis is a project-based and work-life-oriented Master’s thesis model executed in a multidisciplinary student team. In the project, a group of 2-4 students from different Aalto Schools jointly solve a multidimensional challenge given by a work-life partner. Each student writes an individual thesis from the perspective of their field, guided by their supervisor, but all the students' topics are connected through a common challenge. The students receive a grant of 5 000 €.
Aalto Thesis team
