J. Wildeman Portfolio

Benchmark Electronics is in the business of manufacturing electronics and providing services to original equipment manufacturers. The company strives to implement smart industry solutions such as collaborative robots, which is why they use a fully collaborative small parts assembly YuMi robot from ABB to experiment with collaborations between humans and robots.

The YuMi robot comes with stock fingers that are not sufficient in terms of frictional performance when grasping various objects. Nature provides an insight into lots of grip solutions, which is useful for synthetic gripper pad designs. This thesis uses literature and market research together with experiments to come to valuable information about the basics behind the mechanisms used in nature and their suitability within synthetic applications.

Micro-cracks are a form of wear that arises during long use of a product. These micro-cracks can house filth and bacteria, and prove hard to clean. This provides a problem for applications where having clean products, such as in medical environments, is of high importance.

The goal of this literature research was to provide a self-healing material and corresponding production methods that can be used for developing self-healing medical equipment surfaces.

Two biocompatible self-healing methods have been found sufficient for medical applications. This includes a long list of harsh requirements that greatly limited the possibilities. Although both methods have not been proven in practice, both methods could provide reliable ways to create self-healing medical equipment.

This research was conducted together with Willem-Jan Rensink

De Kwispelbus assigned me to the task to design a new company website.

This final website can be found at www.dekwispelbus.nl

De Kwispelbus assigned me to the task to design a logo and some marketing materials for their new company.

- more information will be added soon -

For my bachelor graduation I designed a new portable and safe industrial vacuum cleaner for Kiekens Products. Kiekens is a supplier of industrial ventilation systems and fans. Kiekens designs, develops and produces these products mainly themselves. Currently they have several dealers in The Netherlands and abroad. The costs of producing some of the products were relatively high and therefore these costs had to be be reduced.

One of Kiekens’ products, the AirCleaner, was not sold for a couple of years when I joined the company and therefore it had to be redesigned. A survey and efficiency tests showed that the product did not meet its safety requirements and did not function well. Instead of modifying the already existing product, a new compact, relatively light, easy to produce and assemble AirCleaner has been designed. Some extra features realize safe replacement of full filters and feedback.

Sheet metal has been used to realize almost every part of the product within several cutting and folding actions. The fan used within the product is bolted to the housing, while every other part is clamped together with the parts surrounding it. Both sides of the product can be connected by using 6 threaded rods and a couple of nuts.

The final report, containing all details and product specifications can be found over here.

This new gift package contains olive pickers, an olive container and an exclusive olive bowl made out of olive wood, which keeps all elements together.

For the assignment was to design and underpin a packaging system. This so-called system includes both primary and secondary packaging. The tertiary packaging only had to be specified. Primary packaging refers to the shelf unit; this unit thus can consist of several packages. Secondary packaging refers to the stock keeping unit (a cardboard box, plastic shrink film, plastic crate, tray, wraparound, etc.). All elements of the packaging had to be graphically as well as structurally designed.

The requirements for the assignment were:

• Combine packaging for a food product and a non-food product
• Choose a well-known existing brand and attune the design to its corporate identity and graphic language.
• At least three of the principal packaging material groups are substantially incorporated.

A modern looking tube amplifier which brings classic technology together with modern design. This project included designing, but also building and electronics. It was decided to create a project which uses electron tubes to create a high quality audio amplifier.

Experts in the world of audio amplifiers claim that tube amplifiers generate a genuine and warm sound which cannot always be emulated with transistors. Besides the large variety of tube amplifier schematics and build available, it is also possible to use different types of tubes to created different sounds. For this triode and pentode can be used as the main tubes. Where triode tubes result in more even harmonics allowing less odd-order distortion to take place, pentode tubes result in less oscillation within the tube and overall less distortion.

To test whether the difference between tubes can be heard, a switch is created which allows one to choose whether to use a pentode tube as a pentode or triode tube by activating or disabling some of the tube's inner parts. Several user tests showed that the triode mode had a slightly softer sound while also being defined as 'warmer' and containing more bass.

Changes were made to the original schematic on which this amplifier's electronics are based and new parts were introduced to improve the overall quality of the output sound.