JACQUES PÉTERS (1923-2018)

BY HENDRIK M. J. VAN BRUSSEL

JACQUES PÉTERS, a distinguished scholar and faculty member at KU Leuven in Belgium, was a pioneer in international research in production engineering and was also ordained as a Catholic priest. He passed away Dec. 12, 2018, at the age of 95.

Jacques was born on Dec. 2, 1923, in Liège, Belgium, to Oscar and Anne-Marie (née Maes) Péters. He was the eldest of six children. After Oscar was appointed a professor at KU Leuven in 1930, the Péters family moved to Leuven, where Jacques attended secondary school at Sint Pieters College. While studying for the priesthood at the seminary in Leuven, he also earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics and in Thomistic philosophy. He was ordained in 1948 and completed his master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1951. That same year, he began lecturing at the De Nayer technical college in Mechelen, Belgium, and served as a teaching assistant at KU Leuven for courses in kinematics and dynamics of machines. In 1952, he traveled to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a scholarship from the Belgian-American Educational Foundation (BAEF), where he specialized in interferometric metrology using monochromatic krypton lamps — predating the use of lasers.

Following the death of his father in 1956, he assumed leadership of the KU Leuven production engineering laboratories, which Oscar established in 1930. Jacques became an associate professor that year and was promoted to full professor in 1959. His teaching portfolio covered many aspects of production engineering, including mechanical technology, machine tools, metal cutting, metrology, and engineering statistics.

It is no exaggeration to state that Jacques firmly left his mark on the teaching and research of production engineering at KU Leuven. He was a pioneer in elevating the production engineering trade to an internationally recognized scientific discipline — no small feat at a time when the smell of cooling oil still hung in the air around production shops.

Early achievements from the lab included the design, construction, and marketing of several spectrophotometers to accurately measure product color — whether in food, nylon stockings, or currency — based on trichromatic color theory. All components, including lenses, prisms, and electronics, were fabricated in the lab.

To better align research with the field of production engineering, Jacques and his team developed a cutting test program that used calorimetric measurement of drilling energy, cutting dynamometers equipped with strain gages, and instruments for the online measurement of surface roughness — all developed in-house.

Jacques realized that accurate analysis of the cutting process required considering the dynamic behavior of the machine tool. Building on the pioneering, but incomplete, theories of chatter behavior by Tlusty and Tobias, it became clear that both components of the cutting system — the cutting process and machine tool — had to be analyzed simultaneously. In the years that followed, impressive results emerged through doctoral theses, including research on chatter in grinding, by Raymond Snoeys in 1966, and on dynamic analysis of the turning process, by Hendrik Van Brussel (NAE 2009) in 1971. Both would become central players in the Péters lab, helping develop it into a world-renowned center of research, grounded in the intuitive vision he had laid down.

While early simulation results were obtained with analog computers, the lab was among the first in Europe to acquire and use digital HP Fourier analyzers in 1972. This groundbreaking research led to KU Leuven’s first spinoff company in 1979: Leuven Measurement Systems (LMS). The company was highly successful and, in 2012, was acquired by Siemens AG. It continues today as Siemens Digital Industry Software, with its headquarters still in Leuven.

When numerically controlled (NC) machines and the first computer numerically controlled (CNC) technologies began appearing in the European market in the late 1960s, Jacques strongly advocated for their adoption. He worked to convince conservative Belgian machine tool builders, and their potential users in the machine industry, of the technology’s benefits. While some machine tool builders resisted and eventually disappeared from the market, many users followed his advice to their lasting benefit.

Around the same time, another new technology entered the market: electro-discharge machining (EDM). With his unfailing intuition, Jacques saw opportunity and hired Raymond Snoeys to explore the potential. Snoeys established a research group in close collaboration with the Swiss machine tool builder, Charmilles Technologies. Since then, the lab, renamed the Division of Production Engineering, Machine Design, and Automation (Division PMA), has become a global leader in EDM and related technologies. The lab produced several technological breakthroughs, including adaptive control of EDM, expert systems for wire cutting, pulse analyzers, and predictive wire breakage sensors.

Jacques also introduced and championed other topics in production engineering. These included reducing vibration and noise levels in machine tools to satisfy newly established legal limits and eliminating chatter vibrations. Key developments for this latter area were damped boring bars with tuned dampers, which were successfully used by industry, as well as fundamental studies on the damping characteristics of layered materials. One notable improvement, originating from the lab, was the Dynaliser — an instrument designed to measure the elastic and damping properties of rubber materials such as those used in solid rubber tires. It worked by measuring the response to a step indentation using a steel ball and was successfully commercialized. The Dynaliser has been reintroduced to measure the elastic properties of food products.

During Snoeys’ Ph.D. research, issues with the reproducibility of material properties in grinding wheels led to the development of a nondestructive testing instrument, the Grindosonic. Using acoustic excitation, it measured the Young modulus of grinding wheels. Once again, the commercial success of the resulting product was remarkable.

In the field of metrology, the lab introduced several important developments. Among them was the application of laser interferometry to measuring machines, which was ultimately accepted by industry — an excellent example of successful technology transfer from academia to industry. Another advancement was the development of an innovative roundness measurement device by Paul Vanherck, Jacques’ ingenious chief engineer for many years. That instrument played a key role in shaping a new U.S./ISO standard on roundness measurement.

In the early 1970s, Jacques set his sights on another emerging field: the inroad of industrial robotics in manufacturing. In 1973, he appointed Hendrik Van Brussel to develop a course on dynamic measurement systems. This effort reflected his ongoing commitment to providing a timely and up-to-date academic curriculum in production engineering. In 1998, the education program on production engineering at KU Leuven, developed over the years, coordinated and stimulated by Jacques Péters, was honored with the SME/CASA/LEAD Award, “for excellence in teaching and research in integrated manufacturing.” The robotics research program produced groundbreaking results in force-controlled robots, which were applied in numerous industrial applications through collaboration with large and small companies as well as with the European Space Agency. Gradually, the research focus shifted from industrial robotics to mobile robotics and, eventually, to medical robots.

Jacques continuously sought to transfer academic research in production engineering to the industrial world. He was instrumental in developing the Scientific Technical Center of the Metalworking Industry (WTCM), set up by Fabrimetal/AGORIA, the Belgian federation of technology-based industries. WTCM became a twin center to his lab and was located in the same building as PMA.

Through Oscar’s international academic connections, the International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP) was founded in 1951. CIRP has since evolved, thanks in part to Jacques and other academic pioneers, into the world’s most authoritative research organization in production engineering. Jacques served as CIRP president in 1972-73, and Oscar held the role in 1954-55. Two other members of the lab have also served as CIRP presidents, reflecting the lab’s influence on the global stage.

Another of Jacques’ interests was supporting the developing cooperation with what is now referred to as the Global South. He engaged deeply with the Democratic Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony, where KU Leuven had established Lovanium University (now called Unikin) in the 1950s, in Leopoldville (now called Kinshasa). On several occasions, he traveled there to deliver lecture series on production engineering. He also contributed to the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka; the Asian Institute of Technology outside Bangkok, Thailand, where he served on the Board of Trustees; and at several universities in Vietnam.

His most sustained involvement was as a technical advisor to the Metal Industry Development Centre (MIDC), a project set up by the Belgian Ministry of Development Cooperation in Bandung, Indonesia. This initiative involved establishing a full-scale research factory, including a machine shop, metrology lab, foundry, welding shop, and heat treatment shop. Its mission was to support local industry in developing equipment, mainly for agriculture, and in introducing technologies such as carbide cutting tools and the use of nodular cast iron for pumps handling abrasive fluids in the tin mine industry. In 1971, Jacques convinced Van Brussel, who had just finished his Ph.D., to move to Bandung with his wife and young son, to establish the center from the ground up and to connect it with local industry. Short missions by PMA staff were organized to provide hands-on teaching and demonstrations of specialized topics. As of 2025 the MIDC remains fully operational, employing about 200 people.

Jacques’s commitment to high-quality academic education took exemplary shape in Indonesia through a sustained collaboration between the Institut Technologi Bandung (ITB) and PMA. Under this partnership, the entire staff of ITB’s mechanical engineering department earned a Ph.D. from KU Leuven. Working closely, they developed extensive course material in Bahasa Indonesia, the national language. These resources were used at several Indonesian universities.

Once again, Jacques convinced a promising young academic, Jean-Pierre Kruth, to take part. Kruth, who would later become a leading professor at PMA doing world-class research in EDM, metrology, and 3D printing, moved his family to ITB for three years. There, he used his profound knowledge of production engineering to shape both curriculum and research for the benefit of Indonesian students and society at large.

His international stature is aptly reflected in the many honors and awards he received throughout his long career. He served as a visiting professor at RWTH Aachen University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, and the Technical University of Bucharest. He received honorary doctorates from RWTH Aachen and Aston University in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He was a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts and an international member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was named an honorary member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and received the Research Medal from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. The Senate of Berlin honored him with the prestigious Georg Schlesinger Award.

Besides being a visionary engineer and scholar, Jacques was also a Catholic priest. He often engaged in thoughtful discussion about the relationship between technology and religion, technology and society, and the perceived divide between evolution and creationism, even with dissenting opponents. During the last 10 years of his life, while living in a retirement home, he served as a caring pastor to his fellow residents.

His legacy is honored through the establishment of two triennial awards by the O&J Péters Fund: the International O&J Péters Prize (€50,000) and the O&J Péters Grant for Development Cooperation (up to €35,000).

Jacques will be respectfully remembered by his countless students, academic colleagues around the world, and industrial partners both locally and internationally as a unique, flamboyant, charismatic, inspiring, visionary, and motivating engineer-priest-scholar.