Abstract:

There has been a great deal of interest in industrial heritage in recent years. The first movements detected in this sense date back to the middle of the 20th century, with the creation of committees dedicated to the preservation of industrial monuments, such as the one created through the Council British Archaelogy in Great Britain. Despite the importance of industrial heritage analysis as a discipline, it has not been included in many engineering curricula. The authors of this paper consider that a subject dedicated to industrial heritage would help to contextualize the syllabus of industrial engineering degrees. In particular, the use of current CAD/CAM technologies taught in these degrees is a fundamental tool for analysis. Indeed, thanks to these technologies, it is possible to graphically reconstruct elements that have partially disappeared, simulating the manufacturing processes for their obtention or even reconstructing them to scale in order to better understand how they work. Additive manufacturing techniques act in this sense, facilitating the scale reconstruction of heritage elements. In a more detailed way, the number of elements manufactured by forging and casting since the birth of the Industrial Revolution is innumerable, and, with the tools currently available, they can be conveniently analyzed, situating the state of the art at the corresponding time.

In this context, some teaching experiences have been carried out in the industrial engineering degrees taught at the School of Industrial Engineering of Albacete, which confirms the interest that the study of industrial heritage can awaken in students. The experiences carried out consist of Final Degree Projects, whose proposals were approved by the corresponding academic committee. Given that the experiences are specific, a more extensive analysis is being carried out to establish the degree of interest and the advisability of including this discipline in the curricula. Furthermore, this paper describes the experiences carried out and analyzes the relationship that an industrial heritage subject would have with the rest of the subjects included in the studies.

Keywords:

Industrial heritage, CAD-CAM techniques, Educational curricula.