Enabling Graduate Students to Design for Additive Manufacturing through Teaching and Experience Transfer

Abstract

The cyclic manufacturing processes of Additive Manufacturing (AM) create three-dimensional objects layer by layer, offer a large freedom in design, and suffer from very different restrictions compared to conventional manufacturing processes. Nowadays, AM is a mature manufacturing technology capable of being applied in industrial series production. However, the AM technology enters the industrial series production only slowly. A main reason is the fact that engineers in industry have little to no experience in Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) and an integrated experience transfer in engineering education is not yet widespread. To implement the AM technology, a course for graduate students was developed and established, mainly in the master studies and in the field of mechanical engineering. The goal of the course is that the students gain experience in the possibilities and the restrictions of DfAM. The course is based on the Experience Transfer Model (ETM) and is divided in two parts, a lecture and a team project. In the lecture, the students gain explicit knowledge for DfAM. In the practical team project, the students develop and produce AM prototypes based on a variety of AM processes and gain implicit knowledge. The concept of the team project is based on Problem-Based Learning (PBL). The whole team project follows a product development process, including presentations of milestone. The physical outcomes showed that the students are able to design AM optimized parts without falling back into old design patterns. In a survey at the end of the lecture series, the students gave the authors feedback. The large majority of the feedback was positive.