Undergraduate Industrial Training Year: Freudenberg Performance Materials Ltd
August 2017 - August 2018, I undertook an 12 month industrial placement as part of my undergraduate degree. The blog post on this page
was written to summarize my experience. My placement year was the beginning of my interest in AI, and without it my career goals would
certainly not be aligned with where they are today. More on this later...
What is an industrial training year?
If you go to university at Bath, it is almost impossible to miss the offer of going on a placement year. For my
course specifically, this year formed part of the integrated masters course. To put it simply, the placements
must be lab based and involve an independent research project for it to count towards the graduating with
the MChem degree. The placement takes place during the third year of study and after many applications,
I secured and accepting an offer to work at Freudenberg based at their site in Swindon, UK.
What was my job?
Officially my title was "Development Technician". This put me in the Research and Development department
where I was the third member of the team. My job responsibilities ranged from experimental design, product
testing and collecting, interpreting and presenting data. To explain fully what I did, and so that the
context for the research project is clear, let me first explain what the site in Swindon actually did.
As the name suggests, performance materials was our focus. Specifically, the site ran a treatment
process that was essential in making battery separators. Often, people have asked me what these separators
are and to use the most simple explanation, they are the bit between the positive and negative electrodes.
To say that we made the separator is not totally true either. We actually ran a treatment process on a
base non-woven polymer material that turned it from hydrophobic to hydrophilic. Without giving any specifics away
imaging passing big rolls of material through a large chemical treatment line so that the properties at the
end were changed.
My Research Project
Now the purpose of the site is clear, my project is much easier to explain. The site has 3 different
levels of production line. Main lines were the big, running all day ones that made products we shipped to
customers. A smaller pilot line, called Exicon, was used for testing new parameters and ideas during
product development. Finally, we had a bench scale set up, called "the blue box". My project was to designed
to investigate a new processing idea on the blue box, and then we tried scale up to Exicon. I cant share
further details as it would be too specific, but this leads nicely onto why I became interested in data
science and AI.
The start of my AI curiosity...
Each and every day on placement was the same for me. We tried some new ideas and processing parameters
on the pilot lines. We took samples of the material at the end, and I performed a variety of quality control
tests on them to see how out changed had impacted the properties. At first, this was fairly interesting. New testing,
different results and learning about the fundamental chemistry behind the process was all new and exciting. However,
every time we did these big parameter sweeps of different processing conditions, it felt like more of the same. Only
our best material was kept, and even the uninitiated individual would feel there wasn't too much to differentiate
our testing efforts. Now this left me wondering about learning from experience and trying to minimise the testing.
In fact, after doing this placement, I distinctly remember discussing this very concept with my interviewers when I
applied for my PhD. Looking back, before I had any ideas machine learning even existed, my mind had begun to wander
down the path, which I am still on to this very day!
Final thoughts…
Having completed the placement, it pointed me towards industry more than academia. Although testing
was repetitive, seeing the work we did put into production was rewarding and really reinforced my interest
in seeing tangible output from research efforts. I must confess, I am making this website a good number of years
after I ended this placement, and so I can't even be sure the site in Swindon still exists. If by some
strange coincidence the people who I spent the year with stumble across this blog post, then please accept
my thanks for being such fantastic colleagues. In particular, Bill, I hope you are finding success. Iain, who I adamantly
protested to that a PhD was not on my career path, you were right. But more importantly, thank you for
entertaining and extending my early interest in programming. Little did I know those were the first steps
towards where I have ended up today.