USING RAPID MANUFACTURABILITY ANALYSIS TOOLS TO ENHANCE DESIGN-FOR-MANUFACTURING TRAINING IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION

摘要

Engineering students are often unaware of manufacturing challenges introduced during the design process. Students tend to design parts that are either very difficult or impossible to manufacture because they are unaware of the intricacies and limitations of the manufacturing processes available. Design for manufacturability (DFM) education must be improved to help address this issue. This work discusses a vision for the implementation of a rapid method for facilitating DFM education in terms of subtractive and additive manufacturing processes. The goal is to teach students about how their designs impact the ease and cost of manufacturing, in addition to giving them knowledge and confidence to move fluidly between additive and subtractive manufacturing mindsets. For subtractive manufacturing, this is accomplished through a high-performance-computing accelerated and parallelized trajectory planning software package that enables students to visualize the subtractive manufacturability of the parts they design as rapidly as they get feedback when using additive manufacturing processes. Implementation of the subtractive manufacturability analysis tool in a sophomore-level design class is presented, along with the assessment of the students' conceptual manufacturing-related understanding.