Professor Brecht Van Hooreweder is specialised in 3D printing, also called Additive Manufacturing (AM). He is leading the AM research team at KU Leuven since 2016, and he supervises nearly 20 researchers in this field at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He teaches about production technology and 3D printing to over 200 engineering students every year and has developed an interest to disseminate his experiences to a broader audience, hence this website.
Brecht has been fascinated by science and technology for many years before he started his studies Engineering Technology in 2003 at KU Leuven – campus Group T. In 2006, he interrupted his studies for one year to team-up with 14 fellow engineering students to design, manufacture and test a solar powered race vehicle. In 2007, this Belgian Solar Team became vice-world champion in the World Solar Challenge in Australia. They competed with over 20 international student teams from all over the world to race 3000km from Darwin to Adelaide. The unique experience of this technologically challenging Solar Team project inspired Brecht to deepen his scientific background and to pursue an academic career.
In 2008 Brecht started as research engineer at the Mechanical Engineering Department of KU Leuven. Soon after that, he secured IWT funding for a 4-year PhD on mechanical fatigue of metals and polymers under the supervision of Prof. Paul Sas. Brecht developed new multi-axial fatigue testing concepts and machines and used 3D printing to easily produce complex shaped polymer test samples for experimental setup validation. Soon it became clear that those samples showed very poor mechanical behaviour and a lot of scatter in fatigue data. Triggered by this experimental findings, Brecht started investigating the failure mechanisms of 3D printed materials, and he never stopped…
During his KUL and FWO funded postdoctoral research at KU Leuven from 2013 till 2016, he continued on his endeavours to understand the threefold relationship between AM process, material structure and mechanical behaviour of 3D printed polymers and metals. During those years Brecht collaborated closely with the AM team of Prof. Jean-Pierre Kruth. He also combined his work at KU Leuven with research stays at the University of Cape Town (South-Africa) and the University of Delft (The Netherlands).
Prof. Jean-Pierre Kruth pioneered the AM activities at KU Leuven since 1990 and is a recognised expert in the AM research field worldwide. He retired in 2016 after which Brecht took over his role as head of the AM team.
Some additional links:
- The KU Leuven AM website
- A full CV of Prof. Brecht Van Hooreweder
For more information about the current research and education on 3D printing, please check the tabs above.