Читать книгу Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing - Zhuming Bi - Страница 28

Manufacturing engineering is to apply mathematics and science in practice to design, manufacture, and operate products. Engineers in the manufacturing sector focus on design, development, and operation of manufacturing systems to make competitive products. The existing engineering curricula usually include some core courses in mathematics, physics, computing engineering, and management, as well as some sophisticated courses in mechanical and manufacturing engineering such as materials science, statics and dynamics, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. Engineering curricula are generally designed to cover as many sub‐disciplines of mechanical and manufacturing engineering as possible. Students have options to specialize in one or more sub‐disciplines. Some typical courses for the bachelor's degree in design in manufacturing engineering are listed in Figure 1.21a (Wikipedia 2017). From this perspective, existing curricula are mostly discipline‐oriented.

Figure 1.21 Mismatch of subdisciplines and computer aided tools in manufacturing engineering. (a) Subdisciplines in manufacturing engineering and (b) computer aided tools in digital manufacturing.

From the perspective of computer aided technologies, numerous computer aided tools become commercially available. However, these software tools are application‐oriented, and most of the tools are developed based on the theories in multiple disciplines. Figure 1.20b shows a list of commonly used computer aided tools in the manufacturing sector. Due to the strong decoupling of multidisciplinary knowledge in these software tools, the classification of disciplines in manufacturing engineering is not well aligned with the classification of available computer aided tools. Figure 1.20 shows that there is no one‐to‐one correspondence between sub‐disciplines and available computer aided tools.

The misaligned engineering curricula and a broad scope of computer aided tools in manufacturing pose a great challenge in the teaching of manufacturing engineering. On the one hand, the sub‐disciplines in manufacturing engineering are so diversified that an ever‐increasing number of elective technical courses are needed in engineering programmes. Meanwhile, public education systems are facing the pressure to reduce the number of credit hours for college degrees. Taking as an example the mechanical engineering program at Purdue University, Fort Wayne, the number of required credit hours for a bachelor degree has been reduced from 126 in the spring of 2012 to 120 in the spring of 2017 (Bi and Mueller 2016). On the other hand, engineering programmes are responsible for preparing students for an appropriate set of knowledge and skills using advanced computer aided tools; however, more and more computer aided tools are becoming commercially available and so their functionalities need to be upgraded and expanded continuously. This proves to be a great challenge to integrate disciplinary theories and computer aided tools in the limited selection of engineering courses.