The Scientific Technical Committee (Electro-Physical & Chemical Processes) STC E held two meetings in 2017: Paris, France, on February 17 and Lugano, Switzerland, on August 25. The meetings were chaired by STC E chairman Prof. Paulo Bartolo.

The technical presentations and discussions at the Paris meeting included: “Additive Manufacturing of Custom Ankle Foot Orthoses” (A. Shih); “WC-Co Tools Fabricated via Selective Laser Melting” (A. Fortunato); “Use of Additive Manufacturing for High-Throughput Material Development” (F. Vollertsen); “Ultrasonic Vibration-Assisted Grinding” (Z.J. Pei); “Shaping and Sharpening of PCD Tools Using Wire Electrical Discharge Machining” (C-L Kuo); “Tangential Ultrashort-pulsed Laser Processing of Helical PCD and PCBN Tools” (M. Warhanek); “Dependence of the periodicity of Laser Induced Periodic Surface Structure on Polarisation States in Femtosecond Laser Ablation of Silicon” (C. Kong); “High Throughput Laser Texturing of Antibacterial Surfaces on Stainless Steel” (L. Romoli).

During the August meeting (in Lugano), the following technical presentations were given and discussed: “Field Emission Characteristics of Plasma Treated Carbon Nanotubes on Diamond Tip Arrays” (H-Y Tsai); “Tooling for Biodegradable Green Fiber Bottles Production” (G. Bissacco); “Microstructure Evolution of Inconel 625 from Selective Laser Melting to Heat Treatment” (Y. Guo); “Elemental Additive Manufacturing of Metals using Laser Melting” (D. Bourell); “Laser Micro/Nano Texturing for Surface Functionalisation” (L. Li); “On the Development of a High-Precision Simulation Tool for Laser Micro Machining Industrial Applications” (P. Stavropoulos).

During the Paris and the Lugano meeting, the progress of this year’s and up-coming keynote papers were discussed: Cross-STC Keynote 2017: “Laser Based Additive Manufacturing in Industry and Academia” (M. Schmidt, M. Merklein, D. Bourell, D. Dimitrov, T. Hausotte, K. Wegener, L. Overmeyer, F. Vollertsen, G. Levy); STC E Keynote 2017: “Materials for Additive Manufacturing” (D. Bourell, J.-P. Kruth, M- Leu, G. Levy, D. Rosen, A. Clare, P. Bartolo); STC E Keynote 2018 “Advances in Macro-Scale Laser Procesing” (M. Schmidt, L. Overmeyer, F. Vollertsen, M. Zäh, L. Li, J. Duflou); Cross-STC Keynote 2018 “Bio-Inspired Texturing” (A. Malshe, K. Rajurkar, H. Haitjema, S. Bapat); STC E Keynote 2019 “Visualization of Electro-physical and Chemical Processes” (M. Kunieda); STC E Keynote 2020 “Space Manufacturing” (B. Hon, L. Overmeyer, K. Thompson); STC E Keynote 2021 “Additive Manufacturing in Emerging Manufacturing Systems and Economy” (P. Butala, P. Bartolo, G. Putnik); STC E Keynote 2022 “Selective Laser Melting (SLM): From Powder to Part” (S. Hinduja).

During the Paris meeting an update on the Collaborative Working Group on “Bio-inspired Functional Surfaces, Processes and Designs” was presented. During the Lugano meeting, there was a discussion of the newly formed Collaborative Working Group on Additive Manufacturing.

During both meetings, the progress on the organization of ISEM XIX (to be held in Bilbao, April 2018) and the 5th ICNFT conference (to be held in Bremen, September 2018) were given. During the Lugano meeting a proposal from ETH Zürich to host the 20th ISEM conference was presented (to be held in Zürich, June 2020).

During the STC E paper session at the General Assembly in Lugano, 18 papers were presented followed by discussions (questions and answers). All 18 papers were included in Vol. 1 of the CIRP Annals. The papers covered the following topics: Electro-Discharge Machining and Electro-Chemical Machining (7), Additive Manufacturing (6), Laser-based Manufacturing (5) and Electroplating (1).

The STC E Keynote Paper “Materials for Additive Manufacturing” was presented by D. Bourell during the general session on August 21, 2017. In addition, the Cross-STC Keynote Paper “Laser Based Additive Manufacturing in Industry and Academia“ was presented by STC E member M. Schmidt during the general session on August 21, 2017.