ME 4950: Digital Manufacturing and Product Innovation

Course Description

This combined lecture and hands-on project course aims to familiarize students to optimize the interplay of materials, people, machines and products. The course introduces approaches to develop product concepts with commercial potential. Student teams will explore market needs, conceptualize product ideas to cater to those needs and explore the intellectual property space around their ideas. Students will iteratively develop prototypes via digital manufacturing (e.g., 3D CAD/CAM files manifested via digital printing or machining). Early stage prototypes will progress into more sophisticated designs, scaling up (cost, pricing, tooling, process flow and automation) scenario planning for manufacturing. Concepts of direct digital manufacturing and the associated tools will be discussed. Methods of real time data acquisition, quantitative data analysis, and predictive analytics will be discussed. (YR).