A Structure For Integration Of Manufacturing And Mechanical Design Engineering Courses

Abstract

Recent technological and industrial advancements have created a need for new initiatives in higher education programs. Graduating engineers today must be well versed and proficient in many disciplines other than their major fields. Not only do they need to be knowledgeable, but also be able to synthesize and apply their knowledge to the current product and/or system development tasks. As an initial phase in addressing this need, an integrated course structure was developed between Manufacturing Engineering course MFGG-490 Robotics and MECH-312 Design of Mechanical Components. Three inter-disciplinary student teams were formed with the objective for each team to design, analyze, fabricate, install and test a robot gripper to pick up injection molded parts from the molding machine. The students interacted and communicated both during common lab times and outside of the classroom. As a result, there were many simultaneous design and manufacturing process information changes. Students designed, redesigned, analyzed, machined gripper parts, assembled them, and tested the function of the grippers. A competition was held and the best optimal gripper was chosen based on the functionality and quality of work performed. The next iteration will include design of experiments to verify gripper functions.