Preparing industry for additive manufacturing and its applications: Summary & recommendations from a National Science Foundation workshop

Abstract

Accompanying the increasing advances and interest in Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies is an increasing demand for an industrial workforce that is knowledgeable about the technologies and how to apply them to solve real-world problems. As a step towards addressing this knowledge gap, a workshop was held at the National Science Foundation (NSF) to discuss the educational needs to prepare industry for AM and its use in different fields. The workshop participants-66 representatives from academia, industry, and governmentidentified several key educational themes: (1) AM processes and process/material relationships, (2) engineering fundamentals with an emphasis on materials science and manufacturing, (3) professional skills for problem solving and critical thinking, (4) design practices and tools that leverage the design freedom enabled by AM, and (5) cross-functional teaming and ideation techniques to nurture creativity. The paper summarizes the industry speakers and presentations from the workshop, along with several new educational partnerships identified by small working groups. Based on the presentations and partnerships, the following recommendations are offered to advance the AM workforce. First, ensure that all AM curricula provide students with an understanding of (i) AM and traditional manufacturing processes to enable them to effectively select the appropriate process for product realization; (ii) the relationships between AM processes and material properties; and (iii)-Design for AM‖, including computational tools for AM design as well as

Skills and Education for Additive Manufacturing: A Review of Emerging Issues

“…[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Some of the work particularly focuses on skills [6,[12][13][14][15][16]. In addition, a synthesis of the findings from various workshops and surveys [6,10,11] is included to provide a broader view of the issues from industry, government and academic perspectives.…”

University Education in Additive Manufacturing and the Need to Boost Design Aspects

“…Minetola et al (2015) claim that the full exploitation of AM technology can be achieved by early exposure of forthcoming designers to AM tools to turn them in to a "thinkadditive" approach to product design, which is a ground-breaking conception of geometries and product functionalities. Realising the educational needs in AM, Simpson et al (2017) recommend that AM curricula provide students with capabilities concerning, among the others, Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM), which, in turn, should include computational tools for AM design as well as frameworks for process selection, costing and solution generation. Ferchow et al (2018) believe that engineers in industry have little or no experience in DfAM and an integrated experience transfer in engineering education is not yet widespread.…”

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“…Although concerns are still placed on the challenges of getting the technology to work (Gardan, 2016), several industry actors have started to explore the business potential of additive manufacturing. Research largely remains focused on the technological advancement, although voices have recently been raised about how additive manufacturing research needs to be integrated with industry (Simpson et al, 2017), and thereby affecting business practices. In short, additive manufacturing is expected to change the ways in which business is run (Brennan et al, 2015;MacCarthy et al, 2016).…”

“…It further points out research gaps in the intersection of additive manufacturing and business models. The contributions are important due to the emerging practical interest in additive manufacturing (Simpson et al, 2017) and because the literature specifically focusing on business models and their changes related to additive manufacturing has not previously been systematically summarized and analyzed.…”