Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering 165: Advanced Manufacturing Choices

Manufacturing processes can be organized by considering the type of energy required to shape the work-piece. In this course, sources of energy considered for machining are mechanical used for cutting and shaping, heat energy such as in laser cutting, photochemical such as in photolithography, and chemical energy such as in electro chemical machining and chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Students, guided by product specifications and a design will decide: 1) When to apply mechanical machining vs. lithography based machining, 2) What type of mechanical machining and what type of lithography based machining to apply, 3) When to employ bottom-up vs. top-down manufacturing, 4) When to choose serial, batch or continuous manufacturing and 5) What rapid prototyping method to select. A logical decision tree will be presented to sort the machining options. Examples from a variety of products ranging in size from nanometers to centimeters will be considered.