Machine tool school days

Jennifer Creamer, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), conducts research into fixing flaws introduced when machining large components. Several different approaches exist to help compensate for those errors, but none of them provides a complete picture, according to Creamer.

Manufacturers must combine various methods to get the best sense of a milling problem. The result, she wrote, is “a piecemeal approach that makes calibration a time-consuming and expensive process.”

Maci Key is newly enrolled in a machine tool technology program
at Wallace State Community College. Image courtesy of WSCC

Creamer set out to find a way to eliminate that piecemeal approach and develop a new model for capturing complicated geometric errors while automatically generating compensation tables for those errors.

Beyond her research, Creamer herself is worthy of attention in this era of concern about manufacturing jobs going unfilled because of a lack of interested or qualified candidates. She’s female—still an underrepresented group in manufacturing—and she’s chosen to go into manufacturing by way of Missouri S&T.