2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

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.