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Biography
Dr Martin Baumers is an Assistant Professor in Additive Manufacturing Management with an interest in the benefits and costs of Additive Manufacturing (AM) and 3D Printing and with a background in economics. Completing his undergraduate studies at University of Reading, Martin worked for a year in industry as a market analyst and trading titanium and nickel base alloys. After deciding to continue his studies at the University of Nottingham, Martin submitted a masters dissertation in 2008 on the economics of AM (developed into an article in 2011). To be able to study this field in depth, Martin decided to pursue a PhD at the Additive Manufacturing Research Group at Loughborough University, where he was awarded a Wolfson School Scholarship. After completing his doctoral research in 2012, Martin joined the newly formed Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Research Group at the University of Nottingham as a Research Fellow and Research Coordinator.
Martin has been interested in additive technologies since he saw them for the first time in 2004. After embarking on his academic career, he has written several academic and non-academic papers on the topic, spoken at various events and contributed to AM projects in aerospace, automotive, industrial machinery and the medical and retail sectors.
Expertise Summary
Martin's focus areas are the economics and efficient operation of AM as well as the benefits that can be derived from adopting the technology. From 2010 on, Martin's work has concentrated on the development of novel approaches to production costing and build time estimation. Further areas of interest are process selection, computational build volume packing approaches (pictured) and shape complexity measurement techniques.
Martin also investigates the environmental sustainability of additive processes, with an emphasis on energy consumption, to assess whether AM provides a pathway to more sustainable manufacturing and also more benign products.
Forming the fundament of his research agenda, Martin is interested in investigating and further establishing two particular vistas on AM technology:
- Treatment on AM as a "parallel" manufacturing technology (term coined by Ruffo et al., 2006), enabling the contemporaneous creation of different parts or products. This aspect of digital manufacturing processes carries significance for the fields of Operations Research and Operations Management.
- The possibility of creating additional product (shape) complexity via AM at zero or very low marginal cost and energy consumption (see, for example, Baumers et al., 2014). This aspect could open up a pathway toward the efficient and sustainable manufacture of future products with very high levels of use-phase performance.
Martin is working with a number of academic collaborators within the University of Nottingham and at other international research institutions. He regularly provides peer-review for academic publications and has chaired expert discussions and invited sessions at conferences. In 2014, Martin has received the Best Research Paper Award at the SDM 2014 conference in Cardiff. In 2015, Martin obtained funding in the 3DP-RDM feasibility study competition and has now successfully completed is first project as Principal Investigator.
Teaching Summary
TBA
Research Summary
Martin is currently investigating the broad economics of Additive Manufacturing, with an emphasis on developing a total cost vista on the technology.
Recent Publications
BAUMERS, M., WILDMAN, R., WALLACE, M., YOO, J., BLACKWELL, B., FARR, P. and ROBERTS, C. J., 2019. Using total specific cost indices to compare the cost performance of additive manufacturing for the medical devices domain: Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture. 233(4), 1235-1249
Past Research
Previously, Martin has contributed as a Researcher to a project investigating the suitability of polymeric AM for Healthcare applications. In addition to this, he has successfully led a research project assessing he total cost of polymeric AM in redistributed manufacturing as Principal Investigator. Both projects have ended in 2015. Additionally, Martin is has acted as Co-Investigator on the ViSUaL project investigating new tools to intuitively express concepts and relationships encountered in Big Data (ended in July 2015).
Over the recent years, Martin has contributed to the following research projects (among others):
- Diginova - exploring the convergence of 2D digital printing technologies and Additive Manufacturing. His activities included the identification of key technology challenges & business drivers and technology road mapping and impact mapping (concluded March 2014).
- The Atkins Project - investigating low carbon pathways enabled by AM in transportation applications. His activities included measuring and modeling the energy consumption and financial cost of metallic AM (completed in April 2012).