Design for Additive Manufacturing Education of Process Engineering Students on an Industrial Challenge

Abstract

As the use of additive manufacturing (AM) is increasing in many sectors, the need of design education for AM has gained importance. Solving the challenges of an application with the advantages of AM requires competencies in selecting a suitable AM process, identifying design opportunities and designing for AM based on an extensive knowledge in the application domain. Hence, it is necessary for all branches engineering to develop AM skills and competencies. This paper describes a lecture and practical to develop AM design competencies in chemical process engineering master students. The course teaches designing complex AM parts based on the need of an application by combining the opportunistic and restrictive aspects AM design with the domain-specific functional requirements. The design education benefits from AM’s advantages in rapid prototyping to provide feedback within the time frame of a course. In order to fulfill the above requirements, an application-oriented design course from requirements to testing, involving a simplified real industrial design problem, has been prepared. Students obtain design requirements at the beginning of the practical and have to develop a device using the advantages of AM. After completing CAD design, the designs of the students are produced with the laser based powder-bed fusion of metal (PBF-LB/M) and bath-based photopolymerisation of polymers, curing using ultraviolet light (VPP-UVL/P) methods. The manufactured designs are tested on the test bench provided by the institute. A case study of a hybrid manufactured reactor with internal condensation supports the conclusion of this paper.