Date of Graduation

5-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Mechanical Engineering

Advisor/Mentor

Hu, Han

Committee Member

Jensen, David

Abstract

To effectively serve student career success, mechanical engineering programs must teach students how to account for manufacturing considerations in design. Despite this, manufacturing education is a glaring area of need in current engineering curricula. In fact, basic manufacturing knowledge is one of the only hard skills consistently ranked as one of the greatest weaknesses of mechanical engineering hires in surveys of industrial employers over the last few decades. Without radically changing departmental curriculum to include more emphasis on design-build projects, one solution to combat this is to incubate a lab course in mechanical engineering programs in which undergraduates would practice the principles of design for manufacturing (DFM). This paper details a plan for a project-based course conceived of to accomplish exactly this while maintaining a realistic scope. Avoiding the mistakes of past attempts to incorporate manufacturing topics into mechanical engineering education by narrowing the vision for the course to the 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 industry for engineers who understand common manufacturing processes and how to design for them. Using computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and other visual learning methods as a starting point, students would master the ability to design for specific manufacturing processes representative of universal DFM principles and later apply that knowledge to hands-on manufacturing projects. The motivation behind this course proposal is to boost engineering career success by ensuring students are capable and ready to engineer immediately upon graduation.

Keywords

Concurrent engineering; CNC; Machining; Curriculum; Project-based learning

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