In recent years, MIT has emerged as a leader in additive manufacturing education, by launching several efforts to teach both its own students and to address the rapidly growing industry demand for knowledge of the science and significance of additive manufacturing.
MIT's on-campus manufacturing courses embrace AM as a core module, and use AM for prototyping, tooling, and short-run production; and Professor John Hart has created an intensive graduate AM course which is well-known for student projects that built 3D printers for advanced composites, glass, and even ice cream. In addition, Hart has taught "Additive Manufacturing: From 3D Printing to the Factory Floor," since 2014. The course is a 5-day intensive summer program for industry professionals seeking to acquire the baseline skills and knowledge necessary to lead innovative deployments of AM in their own organisations. This course includes hands-on laboratories and case studies, and has educated hundreds of professionals from around the globe.
Along the way, the team developed an ambition to scale AM education beyond the MIT campus. This month, MIT launches Additive Manufacturing for Innovative Design and Production (abbreviated to AdditiveX), a 9-week long online course that begins on April 30. The course comprehensively addresses the status, fundamentals, applications and implications of AM across the entire product life cycle. It rigorously describes the full spectrum of AM technologies for polymers, metals, and composites; surveys the AM application space; and teaches tools and methods to design parts for AM and to assess their cost and performance value. The instructional team includes MIT faculty from mechanical engineering, materials science, computer science, and management and features many industry contributors.
Key to the design of the course is modularity. Learners are free to make choices about which material is most applicable to their specific interests in AM, beyond a core pathway that all learners complete. Required content is supplemented with a companion resource comprised of video lectures, written material, and process demonstrations. A two-week case study is the capstone experience of the course; this is bifurcated into Design and Strategy tracks which the learner may choose from.
Uniquely, AdditiveX engages learners using the strengths of the digital content platform. Learners use Onshape, a collaborative, cloud-based CAD platform to assist in design for AM (DfAM) exercises. Exemplary parts are shown as static images of the printed part, an engineering drawing, and a 3-dimensional model hosted on Onshape. Learners take a deep dive into a design and manufacturing workflow specific to AM, learning to understand and describe how to design, simulate, orient, and pack parts for production purposes. Industry-leading software for build preparation and topology optimisation is featured to illustrate an advanced production environment. Learners also gain introductory experience in design optimisation via built in use of Frustum's Generate software, a cloud-based generative design tool.
Throughout the course, we include high-resolution images of parts produced by the full spectrum of processes, at each stage of the workflow, and corresponding to dozens of commercial applications of AMs. The team has also designed test parts designed and fabricated specifically to illustrate process capabilities such as part accuracy, surface roughness, support requirements, and detail resolution. One such example is a three-piece model of MIT's central building---including parts made on industrial metal and polymer AM equipment-along with features to study the process capabilities, and design and assembly principles of AM parts. The 3DMIT model also reflects the history of 3D printing at MIT, having been first drawn by Prof. Ely Sachs' team as a test artefact from the binder jetting process shortly after their seminal invention nearly 30 years ago.
Moreover, the course teaches how to articulate the value of AM for diverse applications, including prototyping, tooling, and high-performance end-use parts. To support this value analysis, an MIT-created cost model is presented for learners to download, helping them to make informed decisions about the suitability of AM based on a user-input part volume and mass. Each part is analysed in a process-specific context, allowing users to change their production constraints to fit their specific production setting. The model is then deployed in the Strategy track of the case study, where learners are tasked with leading the adoption of AM at a critical juncture in an organisation's development.
MIT's AMx course concludes with a perspective on the future of AM for design and production, assessing its current trajectory and projecting a tipping point enabled by lower-cost, higher-speed AM technologies in conjunction with automated workflows and data management. We hope that our use of digital learning to scale AM education is well-suited to the diverse interests of industry, and the growing need to deploy new products and business models using AM.
To learn more and watch a recording of an informational webinar about the course visit: http://additivemanufacturing.mit.edu
