Abstract:

The emerge of additive manufacturing and 3D printing has grown through the last few years in industries and investments in new technologies and applications are still increasing. Thus, 3D printing is developing from a tool for rapid prototyping to an important industrial technology for manufacturing. Many universities and educational programs have recognized this and incorporated 3D printing into their curricula and a wide range of education settings can be found. Most of them focus on teaching the students about the 3D printing or use it as a support technology during teaching to produce prototypes or artefacts to aid learning.

But the new (additive or generative layer construction) technology also shows a lack of design knowledge and there are concerns that these lacks will inhibit wider adoption of the additive manufacturing. Over decades students have learned embodiment design (shape and structural design) of technical products focused on traditional (mostly subtractive) manufacture technologies (e.g., mill cutting, turning, drilling). Thus, especially design rules for shape design for ease of manufacture do not work in the field of additive manufacturing. Those traditional design rules can be found in the VDI guideline 2223 "Systematic embodiment design of technical products" for example. The 3D printing allows to manufacture products that have more complex geometry features (e.g., interlocking and overlapping) and with the improvements in the technology the demand for even more complex products will increase. But while it is often said that "complexity is free" in 3D printing this does not mean, that manufacturing constraints can be ignored completely. Even more, designers must deal with a new set of constraints and a new mindset of manufacturing (additive vs. subtractive).

So, the question is: How can we incorporate embodiment design rules for 3D printing into the curricula of engineering design courses?
At the Baden Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW Ravensburg), 3D printing is part of the mechanical engineering curricula since 2017. First, the aim was to provide each student a ready-to-use 3D printer to learn and understand the advantages of the technology and to turn virtual (CAD) models into parts. But this can be only a first step, because providing ready-to use 3D-printers does not give students a deep insight into the technology of state-of-the-art additive manufacturing in industry.

This paper will show how 3D-printing is integrated in engineering teaching and especially how embodiment design rules are teached in lectures, exercises and student-projects. The approach is to teach the design rules for 3D printing through project-based learning after the students have made first experiences with ready-to-use home 3D printers in the lab. During the project the students co-operate with a company for small series production and prototyping using laser sinter technology (SLS). This allows to give a deep insight not only in the SLS technology. Furthermore, the students learn the process-chain in 3D printing and the correlation of embodiment design and quality (resp. costs) in a real-life environment and optimisation for series production.

Keywords:

Design education, additive manufacture, problem based learning.