Maximilian

After completing his military service at the German Airforce, Maximilian Kunkel started as banker at the Savings-Bank Leverkusen, followed by an internship at Deutsche Bank, Colombo, Sri Lanka. He decided to leave banking and started studying industrial engineering, where he encountered additive manufacturing (AM) at Prof. Dr. Gebhardt’s chair of high-performance processes in production engineering at the University of Applied Sciences, Aachen, Germany. Fascinated by this technology, he further deepened his knowledge on AM via his bachelor thesis „Additive Manufacturing of Miniature Models” followed by a study-accompanying employment as project engineer in the project “AM in Germany – Status Potentials and Challenges” at the Institute of Tool-Less Production (IWF), Aachen. Through his master thesis “Introduction of a Virtual Warehouse” Maximilian Kunkel entered Siemens AG, where he was employed as R&D Project Manager to support the introduction AM within the rail-business segment of spare-part services. In parallel he continued his doctoral studies at the Tshwane University of Technology, South-Africa, where he successfully applied convolutional neural networks on meltpool monitoring images to derive a data-based quality prediction for laser-based metal powder bed fusion processes. In 2019 Maximilian Kunkel was entitled “Senior Key Expert” and follows since then the Global Key Expert Career at Siemens Mobility GmbH to further establish AM as a production-solution for spare- and serial parts under maintenance of rail-sector-specific requirements. Next to numerous R&D-projects, Max Kunkel is leading the task force approval at the association Mobility goes Additive e.V. and is an active member of ASTM, DIN and ISO for the standardization of AM processes.