An investigation into the current state of education in Design for Additive Manufacturing

Work in Progress: Development of Educational Kit for Teaching Additive Manufacturing

“…An early example of adopting AM is the addition of rapid prototyping into the engineering curriculum to support learning about innovative manufacturing processes and the development of students' conceptual designs (Helge Bøhn, 1997). Today, a common form of DfAM education is through project-based learning, where students are taught about AM and DfAM and their applications (Borgianni et al, 2022). For example, Go and Hart (2016) demonstrated in-depth learning of AM through lab sessions where students learn about AM through interaction with AM machines.…”

“…Consequently, the increasing use of AM in the industry led to increased demand for workers with knowledge of AM (Asiabanpour, 2019). This generated awareness for research on Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) (Obi et al, 2022) and the need for AM education (Borgianni et al, 2022), especially in higher education (Borgianni et al, 2019;Prabhu, Miller, et al, 2020a;Stern et al, 2019), but also in primary and secondary education as well (Ford and Minshall, 2019;Pei et al, 2019). Ford and Minshall (2019) reviewed where and how AM is used in teaching education, showing that AM is nowadays used as an educational tool in various educational surroundings, from schools and universities to libraries and maker spaces.…”

“…AM is used to teach about AM itself through demonstrations and project-based learning but also to manufacture educational tools for teaching other topics. On the other hand, Borgianni et al (2022) investigated the current state of education in the DfAM area through a survey among AM and DfAM educators, primarily at the university level. Their investigation of current practices in DfAM education showed that it is still a somewhat niche topic, but they emphasise the need to define a pedagogical model for AM education.…”

Providing a knowledge-based design catalog as an approach to support the development of design for additive manufacturing skills

“…It is critical to continuously incorporate these learnings into the training of our future workforce, improving their DfAM skills and maximizing the benefit of additively manufactured products. According to design educators and researchers, future generations' comprehension of DfAM content, such as design principles and design heuristics may be the key to improving DfAM skills and maximizing the potential of additive manufacturing (Rosen et al, 2015;Blösch-Paidosh and Shea, 2022;Borgianni et al, 2022;Thomas-Seale et al, 2022). Given the benefits of simultaneously providing opportunistic and restrictive DfAM content in an early design phase (Prabhu et al, 2021), our AM-community needs an approach to provide and share DfAM knowledge, particularly to include design-specific knowledge on AM products (Schaechtl et al, 2023).…”

Development of biodegradable filaments based on agro‐industrial waste and evaluation of process parameters in final properties

“…2 Additive manufacturing is aligned with the concept of sustainability, considering energy-saving perspectives, low cost, and the possibility of developing structures with complex profiles without the need to develop molds. 3,4 The dimension of additive manufacturing as a production technique has been increasing and spreading rapidly in the aerospace, 5 educational, 6 medical segments, 7 and agriculture. 8 In agriculture, the importance of 3D printing lies in the possibility of small producers having the opportunity to produce tools and products that, in addition to having a lower cost, would make small farms selfsufficient in this sense.…”