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Forming Collaborative Links between Turkey and US: International Workshop on Rapid Technologies

Abstract

As part of a current NSF-CCLI (Course-Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement) grant project, an extra supplementary grant was given in late 2008 to organize an international workshop on Rapid Technologies. This workshop was held in late September 2009 in Istanbul, Turkey. Over seventy academicians and researchers got together and presented the current trends in rapid manufacturing research, education and industry. In this two-day event, educational and technical papers were presented from American, European and Turkish scholars. Reflections of the first and second day have been received from each attendee with an oral interview, and exit survey has been collected to measure the success of the supplementary project and continuously improve the workshop if it is held in the upcoming years. This paper will report the organization of this workshop, and its over-all planning and findings.

Background

Rapid Prototyping (RP) is an almost twenty year old additive manufacturing (AM) technology and it is one of the emerging technologies to keep the USA competitive in a global market. Speed, accuracy and flexibility are the characteristics of RP and are hallmarks of successful, profitable manufacturing. In today’s global market the window for meeting market dates is shrinking. Likewise companies cannot afford to make mistakes when they are bringing a product to market. RP allows quick turnaround times from concept to floor production. RP allows 3D modeling of products that help identify possible product flaws and therefore assists the company in quality management control. RP has unique benefits. It allows the fabrication of geometrically complex, low-volume or customized parts.

RP has applications in such diverse industries as manufacturing, nanotechnology, medicine, pharmaceuticals, engineering, prosthetics, construction, art, gaming, automotive racing, archeology, forensics, clothing design and photonics. In the last few years, Author has organized several RP workshops and trained many P16 STEM educators with the technical details and daily use of this technology. In one of his latest two-day-workshops, he provided training to 25 STEM educators with the help of nationally known experts. The details of this workshop are presented at http://iweb.tntech.edu/rpids/2008_RP_Summit.htm. This successful event helped the participants better understand the evolving field of additive fabrication. At the end of the two- day Summit, most of the P16 educators who attended the Summit found this technology extremely versatile and tangibly expressed that “we want to share our learning with our students in science, technology, and math classes.” They also started scheduling times to bring their students to TTU RP laboratories.

The current workshop was organized to establish collaborative links between the Turkish and American educators, researchers and engineers in Rapid Technologies. The details and impact of the workshop are presented in this paper.

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Fidan, I. (2010, June), Forming Collaborative Links Between Turkey And Us: International Workshop On Rapid Technologies Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16327