Zhuming Bi - Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing

The concern on the discipline‐oriented curricula has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. A number of educational programmes were proposed and implemented to address this issue. For example, the Engage Program sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) aimed to increase the capacity of engineering institutions to retain undergraduate students by facilitating the implementation of three research‐based strategies, i.e. (i) improve faculty–student interaction, (ii) improve spatial visualization skill, and (iii) use everyday examples in engineering teaching, to improve educational experiences (Nilsson 2014; Bi and Mueller 2016).

To adapt the rapid advancement of CATs, this books proposes to improve existing discipline‐oriented engineering programmes, at least for some upper‐level engineering courses. The objective is to develop a new course framework where constitutive elements are not varied with an increase of computer aided tools or the diversification of sub‐disciplines.

The design of an engineering course curriculum is similar to the design of any engineering system in the sense that the complexity and dynamic characteristics become two critical factors to deal with when the system is continuously evolving. The modularity concept has proved to be an effective way to deal with system complexity and dynamic characteristics (Bi et al. 2008). In the similar way, the modularity concept is proposed to deal with the misalignment of discipline‐oriented curricula and a large variety of computer aided software tools in manufacturing engineering.

Figure 1.22shows an alternative to the discipline‐oriented curriculum. It can be referred to as a 4‐P engineering curriculum since the manufacturing fundamental is differentiated for Product , Process , Production , and Platform , respectively, for the required system functionalities in a product lifecycle. The objective of the proposed curriculum is to minimize the impact of the ever‐increasing complexity of the system as well as computer aided tools. Since any manufactured product has its own lifecycle, a taxonomy of engineering courses based on the product lifecycle can sustain its consistence, even though the scope of a manufacturing system or computer aided tools may vary with respect to time.

Following the axiomatic theory (Cochran et al. 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b), the high‐level functionalities for the product, process, production, and platform can be further decomposed as a modularized structure. Take an example the functional requirements (FRs) for a product design, FRs have been decomposed further into the designs of geometries, motions, product families, and a sustainable design related to the product life cycle. The granularity of the functionalities can be appropriate to match the functionalities for well‐established engineering sub‐disciplines as well as available computer aided tools. Due to the modularized structure, the proposed framework has the flexibility to customize the selection of sub‐disciplines and corresponding computer aided tools in a specific engineering curriculum.

Figure 1.22Proposed course framework for digital manufacturing.

The modular framework of digital manufacturing provides the flexibility to select course elements to customize the educational needs in a specific engineering programme. This book is written as a CAD/CAM text to achieve two main goals: (i) introduce manufacturing fundamentals, which are not usually covered in depth in traditional mechanical engineering programmes and (ii) expose students to as many computer‐aided software tools as possible, so that they can utilize advanced computing tools to deal with the designs related to manufacturing processes.

The importance of computer aided technologies in manufacturing engineering has been well recognized. The majority of higher educational institutions offer one or several CAD/CAM courses in their engineering programmes. However, selecting an appropriate textbook proves to be a challenge since all of the textbooks are too sophisticated in certain subjects but lack in coverage on a broad scope of disciplines and CAD/CAM tools. In our primary survey, we found a few common CAD/CAM textbooks that were adopted by different institutions, as shown in Table 1.5.

Table 1.5Examples of existing CAD/CAM textbooks (Wang and Bi 2018).

Since the information technology (IT) has developed so rapidly in recent years, most of the textbooks in Table 1.5are out of the date, and the last three recent ones cover only the integration of CAD and CAM. No appropriate textbook has been found that has a wide coverage of subdisciplines and computer aided tools.

Undergraduates in mechanical engineering with a minor in manufacturing engineering must understand theoretical fundamentals related to the design of products and manufacturing processes. On the other hand, the theories and methods relevant to high‐level planning, scheduling, or computer implementation might not be the first priority for them. To meet our specified teaching needs, the engineering curriculum in Figure 1.23can be utilized to choose appropriate contents for our students. The selected course elements are highlighted in Figure 1.23. The covered CAD/CAM theory and methods are illustrated in Figure 1.24and the corresponding computer aided technologies and tools are accordingly specified in Figure 1.25. The customized CAD/CAM course consists both of the theoretical part in Figure 1.24and the practical training part in Figure 1.25. To sustain the independence for the selection of course elements in a modularized course framework, the axiomatic design theory has been applied to map the theoretical part in Figure 1.24to the computer‐aided tools in Figure 1.25(Bi and Mueller 2016).