Baltimore , Maryland
June 25, 2023
June 25, 2023
June 28, 2023
Mechanical Engineering Division (MECH) Technical Session 10: Capstone and Design Education
Mechanical Engineering Division (MECH)
16
10.18260/1-2--43111
https://peer.asee.org/43111
320
Han Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arkansas. He received his Ph.D. from Drexel University in 2016 and B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2011. Before he joined the University of Arkansas, he worked at the Cooling Technologies Research Center at Purdue University as a postdoc on two-phase electronics cooling. His current research is focused on the development of experimental and numerical tools to address research and development needs in the thermal management of IT and power electronics. The specific areas include single-phase and two-phase cooling with textured surfaces, remote sensing using acoustic emissions and optical imaging, and data-driven modeling of transport processes and multimodal data fusion. His research is supported by federal and state agencies including NSF, NASA, AEDC, and ASGC as well as industrial companies including Google and Safe Foods.
To ensure students are capable and ready-to-engineer immediately upon graduation, mechanical engineering programs must teach students how to account for manufacturing considerations in design. Despite this, basic manufacturing knowledge is a hard skill consistently ranked as one of the greatest weaknesses of new mechanical engineering hires in surveys of industrial employers and project managers over the last few decades. Without radically changing curriculum to include more emphasis on design-build projects, one solution university departments could implement to combat this vulnerability is to incubate a lab course in which undergraduates would practice the principles of design for manufacturability (DFM). This paper details a plan for a project-based course conceived to accomplish exactly this while maintaining a realistic scope in terms of safety and available resources. This plan includes curriculum additions such as review of DFM case studies, a hands-on casting lab, and machining observation, although the majority of the course would be self-paced and taught through computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software tutorials and computer projects. Avoiding the mistakes of past attempts to incorporate manufacturing topics into mechanical engineering education by instead narrowing the vision for the course to the practical context of enhancing students’ design skills, the proposed content is targeted to directly benefit the senior design project experience and reconcile mechanical engineering curricula with the hiring need in the industry for engineers who understand common manufacturing processes and how to design for them. Using computer-aided manufacturing and other visual learning methods as a basis in which to root their understanding, students would master the ability to design for specific manufacturing processes representative of universal DFM principles and later apply that knowledge to deeply-involved manufacturing projects further in the course. By the end, students would complete a final project which would assess, qualitatively, their aptitude in designing for manufacture and understanding of the principles of multi-objective design.
Pierson, S., & Fleming, B., & Hu, H. (2023, June), CAM and Design for Manufacturing: A Project-Based Learning Course Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43111
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