Citation
Gibson, I. (2009), "GARPA news", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 15 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/rpj.2009.15615aab.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2009, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
GARPA news
Article Type: GARPA news From: Rapid Prototyping Journal, Volume 15, Issue 1
With a number of important conferences around this period, GARPA is awakening from a summer in slumber. The first conference was the excellent International Conference on Additive Technologies. I was privileged to be a guest of the organisers of this conference, which was held in Ptuj, Slovenia. The first impression I received was of the deep commitment the Europeans have to Rapid Manufacturing. A large amount of research and development funding has been administered through European funding towards this topic and it is clear that there are at least a few success stories to warrant this effort. The conference also played host to a number of key players in this European RM community and as an outsider, I was able to obtain a good understanding of recent developments. I congratulate Igor Drstvensek and his team on their hard work in putting together such a good event.
As I write this there is the TCT Rapid Manufacturing (Coventry, UK) conference coming up in October, the RAPDASA (Bloemfontein, South Africa) conference and ICRPM (Beijing, China) in November, and Euromold 2008 (Frankfurt, Germany) in December. GARPA has traditionally been a keen supporter of RP and RM conferences and is involved in all of these events. In particular, the GARPA summit meeting will be held at the conference in Beijing, which is hosted by one of the initial supporters of GARPA, Professor Yongnian Yan. Sadly, Professor Yan will shortly retire from Tsinghua University. We wish him well in his retirement and feel his influence will remain for years to come.
I guess at the moment everyone is probably worrying more about their pensions and mortgages than which conference they are going to attend. However, it is worth taking a little time to realise that manufacturing and associated technology plays a significant role on how we support our economies. Understanding how we can take manufacturing into the future will help us stabilise these economies and there is much to be learnt at these events. I hope to see you at one of these events in the near future.
Ian Gibson