Day five of this trip marked our visit to the engineering company of MX3D. The first half of the day saw us travelling to the city center of Amsterdam to observe the 3D printed bridge that MX3D implemented recently in the city. Upon arriving the first thing that I noticed was the sheer size of the bridge. The bridge spanned across an extremely wide canal and occupied a large width of the road. Displayed right as you walk on the bridge was a sign that described how the bridge tracks different types of data as you walk across the bridge. The data is then taken and posted on the company’s website. The overall goal of this project was to prove that 3D printed products have their place in the construction industry and are safe and cheaper to implement than other products. Therefore, the reason that MX3D tracks the bridge data is to prove to the public that 3D printed products and their bridges are safe to use. There were also extremely strong welding techniques implemented into the design of the bridge that insured stability to the design. I was extremely surprised that Amsterdam had a 3D printed bridge because in America, the safety of our infrastructure is always most important. Therefore, I had never seen nor heard of a 3D printed bridge being implemented in the American infrastructure.
The second part of our day consisted of the group visiting MX3D’s office in the west part of Amsterdam. It was extremely insightful to observe all of the business practices that MX3D was implementing. I learned during this part of the trip that the company does not actually design any of the products that they print. They mainly receive designs from other companies and then print them for that original company. This means that in the process of concept to customer that MX3D is sort of a middle company that transports the product into something that can be then sold to a customer. However, they never do the actual sale of their product. They leave that part of the process to the company that requests the part or product that they are going to print. It was also extremely interesting to see how many employees that the company had. Our presenter described how they only had around 30 employees that worked at their branch and that half worked at home. This is similar to what I have seen in the United States where, as a result of the pandemic times, many companies and workers see the benefits of staying home to work.