Infusing Advanced Manufacturing into Undergraduate Engineering Education (2023) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix B: Workshop Summary
Appendix B: Workshop Summary
Pages 88-173
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of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine sponsored a workshop, Infusing Advanced Manufacturing into Engineering Education. The workshop was held as part of the information-gathering process being carried out by an NAE committee working on the project Strengthening the Talent for National Defense: Infusing Advanced Manufacturing in Engineering Education Through Capstone Design Courses.
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As part of the study, the committee had been asked to conduct a workshop to explore the needs of the defense industrial base and to examine ways in which undergraduate engineering education could facilitate the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies. The 2-day virtual workshop had been divided into four sections, Savitz explained, two on each day.
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"Dr. Sagawa won the prize," Anderson elaborated, "for both the idea of the magnet's composition and for the advanced sintering process to manufacture the magnet with reproducible quality and low cost, thus giving it the dominant market position among permanent magnets and electrical devices." In short, Sagawa's work went from invention to development and, finally, to manufacturing, which, Anderson said, is "the epitome of engineering." Because tomorrow's manufacturing capabilities will be determined by today's students, "it is critical for engineering students to appreciate the importance of manufacturing and the advances made with respect to speed, safety, quality, and cost," Anderson said.
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Those are the questions that the workshop should address, she said. ADVANCED MANUFACTURING Because the workshop was focused on infusing advanced manufacturing into engineering education, understanding the workshop's discussions requires first having a clear sense of what advanced manufacturing is.
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Amy Fleischer of California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) , in speaking of advanced manufacturing topics that are being integrated into the engineering
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The best known and most common example of additive manufacturing is 3D printing, where an object is created layer by layer. Michael Sarpu of Lockheed Martin commented that the main value of additive manufacturing is to build something that could not otherwise be built.
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THE STATE OF MANUFACTURING EDUCATION A significant part of the workshop was devoted to understanding the current status of engineering education as it applies to advanced manufacturing; the goal of these presentations was to set the stage for later discussions about what more can be done to better prepare engineering students for jobs in advanced manufacturing. To this end, several of the workshop's presentations, including the keynote, were focused on engineering education in colleges and universities.
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Fulton Schools of Engineering as the largest and most comprehensive engineering school in the United States and noted that those schools offer a variety of opportunities beyond the classroom, including undergraduate and graduate research, peer mentoring, entrepreneurship, student organizations, internships, and community service. In particular, he said, "The newest of the Fulton Schools is the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks, which prepares graduates to tackle the next generation of engineering challenges essential to sustaining global economic growth, strengthening supply chains, and transforming manufacturing systems." Squires began by saying that he hoped to offer some context for the discussions in the rest of the workshop.
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About one-third of the 7,000 students in ASU's Barbara and Craig Barrett Honors College are engineering students. There are 25 undergraduate degree programs and more than 50 graduate programs in engineering.
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[W] e had to establish the structures and thought process to be able to do that." The Fulton schools also have transdisciplinary connections with a number of other segments of the ASU community, he added, including the School of Earth and Space Exploration (which does significant work with NASA)
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For example, one of the largest residence halls on campus is for engineering students. "We teach classes there," Squires said.
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In data analytics, cyber, and artificial intelligence, Squires again listed three areas in which ASU engineering is doing work: manufacturing quality control, heterogeneous data fusion and behavior modeling, and secure and resilient systems. In the area of manufacturing quality control, he spoke about how it is now possible to use the great amounts of data collected during manufacturing processes to make improvements midstream by analyzing the data and acting on them in real time.
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The four speakers were Amy Fleischer, dean of engineering at Cal Poly; Guillermo Aguilar, head of the mechanical engineering department at Texas A&M University; Susannah Howe, a capstone design instructor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; and Chris Saldaña, the manufacturing group chair at Georgia Tech.
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Furthermore, the manufacturing engineering program offers a number of service courses across the school's engineering curriculum, and not only mechanical engineering students but also those majoring in aeronautical engineering, biomedical engineering, and materials engineering take many of the courses provided by the manufacturing program. The engineering students at Cal Poly are somewhat different from those in other schools, Fleischer said, in that they come into the program looking for hands-on learning.
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"We are moving into reverse engineering with 3D scanning," she added, "and now a nice emphasis on data analytics and smart manufacturing with data in real-time control is being integrated into our coursework." Switching topics, Fleischer said that it is very important for a program like Cal Poly's manufacturing degree to have strong industry partnerships. For example, the department has a partnership with Haas Automation.
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The college also offers interdisciplinary senior design projects, and students in the manufacturing program do blended projects that combine industrial engineering and manufacturing engineering. "As they work through those projects," Fleischer said, "they are building not only the prototypes but also looking at costing and how would they transition to scale manufacturing." With these sorts of experiences, she said, Cal Poly's engineering graduates are highly sought-after by industrial companies.
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Over the long term it will be necessary to make changes in the curriculum, but doing so will require either taking time away from core courses -- and thus short-changing the training in fundamentals -- or else cutting into the time spent on general education courses, but "that is a steep hill to climb," he said, "considering all the changes that need to be approved at the upper levels of the university." On how to move students from design and prototyping to manufacturing, Aguilar said that serious investments will be needed and, unfortunately, not every institution will be able to afford them. Modern manufacturing generally requires major capital investments, and the closest thing that Aguilar's department has been able to achieve is small-scale desktop devices such as lasers, 3D printers, and CNC machines that can be used to provide some hands-on training to students.
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Finally, he spoke about what steps are needed to better integrate advanced manufacturing into undergraduate engineering education. It will take, he predicted, a "big infusion of resources to make advanced manufacturing training devices accessible to the many students we train now nationwide." However, he added, this is not something that many institutions will be able to afford, at least not at the necessary scale, and so the best approach may be to partner with industry and with government to provide the sort of equipment necessary to expose students to advanced manufacturing as part of their education.
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The survey results indicate that the number of students taking capstone courses at various institutions has been growing over time, she said, and most 1 S
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The most common project expenses were for supplies, hardware, software, faculty time, and travel. Next Howe described some results from a project that looked at the transition from capstone project to workplace for a number of engineering students from four different institutions.
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Georgia Institute of Technology Saldaña is, in addition to being Georgia Tech's manufacturing group chair, the instructor for Georgia Tech's capstone design course and also lead faculty for a new NSF industry–university cooperative research center in advanced manufacturing. He spoke about the university's efforts to build an "ecosystem" for an undergraduate experience centered around manufacturing education.
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Students can also choose various manufacturing-related electives that cover such topics as process analysis, additive manufacturing, and artificial intelligence and machine learning, where students learn about digital manufacturing. Finally, students integrate what they have learned in a capstone design course.
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These students use pretty advanced technologies, he said, including composites, CNC machining, and 3D printing. Georgia Tech also has a university-wide initiative to instill entrepreneurial confidence in students and to empower them to launch startups.
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Saldaña added that it is important to find ways to increase the retention of women and minority students in engineering programs. For instance, he said, Georgia Tech's mechanical engineering makerspace does a good job holding demographic-specific focused events, such as a women's night
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"However," he added, "I would say we are heavily supported by industry in our research, so everything that we do in our research programs and that we expose our students to, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, has a basis in industrial operation … so in that sense we are not developing systems that are never going to be used." Fleischer said that with Cal Poly's learn-by-doing environment, great value is placed on industry experience, and such experience is weighed heavily in considering applicants. Among those faculty who teach senior capstone courses, probably 75–80 percent have had industry experience at some point in their careers, and the lecturers in the engineering departments include many people who came to Cal Poly after several decades in industry.
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"Not everyone is going to hop on a CNC machine and learn how to set it up, for example." Parekh, the third moderator, then asked the panelists a question: "If you could additively manufacture a magic wand and wave it over your own program, what would be the main change you would make that you can't today but that you think would significantly improve its impact in terms of preparing your students for their careers? " Aguilar answered that he would relax some of the general education requirements for engineering students to create more room for teaching engineering concepts and skills.
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However, he added, there is little done at the undergraduate level that is aimed at integrating robotics into manufacturing education. Howe followed up by saying that there are no formal courses in robotics at Smith, but there have been a couple of capstone projects with a robotics focus.
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Finally, Saldaña said that Georgia Tech's policies are similar, although companies will pay a little extra to get the rights to the intellectual property ahead of time. The students in the capstone courses are told ahead of time what to expect, so they can opt out of any such projects if they are not comfortable with that arrangement.
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116 INFUSING ADVANCED MANUFACTURING The Iron Range Engineering Program Neil Schroeder from Minnesota State University Mankato described that school's Iron Range Engineering program, which is offered to students who have taken pre-engineering courses at a community college, typically Itasca Community College in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Those students then enter the Iron Range Engineering program, taking core and advanced engineering courses and doing engineering design projects that are carried out in partnership with local industries, including U.S.
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Desirable Traits in Engineering Students In answer to a question about what universities could be doing to address some of the issues that had been discussed, Michael Packer, recently retired from Lockheed Martin and working with SME (previously the Society of Manufacturing Engineers) , offered a perspective on what some of the professional societies are looking for in university education.
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"They have to be comfortable interacting in a substantive way with the mechanics and technicians on the floor and with customers, beyond just engineers." Engineering students will generally have a decent amount of experience working on teams of engineers from their capstone projects and their co-ops, but they generally do not get experience working with the other sorts of people that are found in a manufacturing setting. "A lot of engineers that are just simply not comfortable going down to the floor and talking to a mechanic or a toolmaker or a technician before they start to put something together," Packer said, and with today's digital tools it is easy to believe that because a computer-aided design exists, the product can be build.
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"Force them to go to the floor and talk to people that were experts in making holes and filling holes before they committed to something" because CAD designs that look slick on the computer do not always work out that way on the factory floor. In response, committee co-chair Maxine Savitz commented that the committee had heard from a faculty member at Auburn University that the engineering students there have various ways to interact with community college students, such as getting certified on a machine that is not available at Auburn but is available at a local community college.
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For example, in one breakout session Al Romig, the executive officer of the NAE, made the point that hands-on learning is an important way to get students, particularly in middle school and high school, interested in engineering and manufacturing. "When a lot of us were growing up we had shop class in middle school or junior high school and high school, and I'm glad to see that coming back now in terms of makerspaces, even at the high school level," he said.
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The University of Michigan has about 1,200 engineering students, but only the mechanical and industrial engineering students -- about 20 percent of all engineering students -- get manufacturing training. Aerospace engineering students, for example, do not have a regular manufacturing course.
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"There's that person in the room that is asking questions, and I think that not only are they looking at different approaches and different ideas, but they're learning the social cues of working on teams. The business major comes in with this natural kind of apprehension that they aren't familiar with how to build a robot, or how to do CAD, but what we found is those teams greatly benefit from just the interaction of working with different personalities and being able to listen to those perspectives." Saldaña added that while many of the capstone projects in the mechanical engineering department are focused just on mechanical engineering, there are also interdisciplinary projects in which, say, a materials scientist or a public policy person works on the team, "and I think those students are benefiting from that experience too." Speaking from an industry perspective, Al Romig commented that his experience in the Lockheed family is that "students who come out of school are good at teamwork amongst their small little group, but many of them don't have a good sense of interdisciplinarity." Most universities are not particularly good at bringing different departments together, so students do not get experience working with others from outside their discipline.
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Speaking specifically of capstone projects, Lagoudas said that there are also challenges to bringing different disciplines into them. At Texas A&M, there are some interdisciplinary capstone projects, but the question is how to scale this so that all students have that opportunity.
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"We require our students to also finish a thesis at the end of their 4-year educational experience," the participant said. "The thesis, in combination with the portfolio, can really give you a good overview of the skills of that particular student, especially if they start developing the portfolio early on." A related discussion took place about the value of students taking part in competitions, including what students learn from them and how potential employers should weigh such participation.
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THE INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE The session on industry perspective was moderated by Don Kinard, a senior fellow in production operations at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas, and Keith Hargrove, who currently serves as a provost at Tuskegee University but has a background in manufacturing and engineering, having worked at both General Electric and Boeing. Kinard began by asking the panelists to introduce themselves and offer a bit about their backgrounds.
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We are not only just providing the big, large, static tooling that everyone needs in order to manufacture aircraft components as well as full aircraft, but also the automation, the processes, and the innovation that goes along with being able to support the operations of those lines." THE CURRENT STATE OF ADVANCED MANUFACTURING IN THE UNITED STATES To open the discussions, Kinard asked each of the panelists how they see the current health of the advanced manufacturing industry, especially the defense manufacturing industry, in the United States. Bigot began his answer by saying that the industry needs some help, which, he said, is why Ascent Aerospace is doing well.
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You first have to have the base process down." The next issue is what is being done with the advanced manufacturing technology to make the process better. He offered additive manufacturing as an example.
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"And then the one that we never really think enough about," he said, "is the actual worker that is going to use the manufacturing technology." He works with a couple of universities with advanced manufacturing technology centers where they focus on the tools and the design but seldom pay much attention to the worker who must operate the machines. Sarpu drew a parallel with the first industrial revolution when Henry Ford and others who created the first assembly lines have trouble finding workers who were willing to do the work.
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Fifty years ago, building a factory was a long-term commitment because it could not be moved easily, but many of today's advanced manufacturing technologies -- such as additive manufacturing processes -- are much easier to move. Furthermore, the increasing use of automation and human augmentation decreases the number of jobs and, combined with the increased ease of moving facilities, makes communities more leery of hosting such facilities.
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Through middle school and high school he worked in pattern shops, iron foundries, and tool and dye shops and went on to spend another 40 years in the industry and also in professional groups such as the Manufacturing Leadership Council of the National Association of Manufacturers as well as the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council, which focuses on the skill standards and certifications of frontline workers. Over that time, he said, he developed a philosophy concerning advanced manufacturing education.
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ARE UNIVERSITIES PREPARING ENGINEERS FOR ADVANCED MANUFACTURING? Next, Kinard asked the panelists to address the question of whether universities are appropriately preparing their engineering students for working in industry.
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In previous work in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, she led the development of the digital engineering concept, strategy, and initial imple mentation efforts across the military services as well as in industry, academia, and various government agencies. Digital engineering, she said, is "an engi neering approach that captures and analyzes data in a digital format, which is semantically rich and interconnected to enable both people and machines to leverage the power and advancements in technology across the complex life cycle of both systems and products." The move to digital engineering will be crucial to advanced manufacturing, she said, and thus also for engineer ing education.
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Given the importance of digital engineering to advanced manufacturing, Gilbert said, this digital engineering competency framework could be very useful in informing undergraduate engineering education.
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A student with a 3.2 GPA who had experience designing and building a vehicle with a Formula SAE team might be a much better choice in terms of being able to apply engineering skills. A related part of the issue is that companies do not always think about which specific type of engineering they should be hiring -- an applications engineer, a materials engineer, a process development engineer, or whatever.
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Do U.S. engineering students need more of this sort of hands-on experience?
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Such innovation centers offer many opportunities to augment the theoretical work done in classrooms, Packer said, with activities such as design-and-build competitions and capstone courses. They also offer the opportunity for students from different areas -- not just different engineering areas, but also areas such as economics and business -- to interact and work on teams to complete a project.
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Another major connection with universities is that Lockheed Martin hires about 3,000 engineering students as interns every year. The company also hires many permanent employees every year, Kinard said, and "if you intern with us you're essentially guaranteed to get at least one job offer from us." After hiring, most of the training is done in-house.
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"I think incumbent upon us, upon engineers, is to get the message out there about how engineering is about solving problems that help people in society, etc. It could be about improving the nation, it could be about improving human health, it could be about improving sustainability, but the compellingness of missions will attract people to the field and will attract them to companies." Sinan Bank of California State University, Chico, praised the value of engineering students having internships with industry but said that it would be valuable if they were longer than the typical 3 months of a summer break.
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Savitz moderated the panelists' presentations, while Kurfess led the following discussion. In introducing the session, Savitz said that the past 10 years have seen exciting advances in advanced manufacturing technologies that have come about through innovations in science and technology as well as improved manufactured products and manufacturing processes.
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The second speaker was John A Hopkins, the chief executive officer of the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI)
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Pilat then offered brief descriptions of several MxD projects in which undergraduate engineering students were involved as examples of how students can be exposed to advanced manufacturing. In one case, an undergraduate student at the Missouri University for Science and Technology worked with the project team to create an automated machining system that compensated for the variation in the casted or forged parts that were being machined.
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INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED COMPOSITES MANUFACTURING INNOVATION In the next presentation, Hopkins of IACMI, also known as the Composites Institute, spoke about what the institute is doing to prepare students for the composites manufacturing workforce and thus increase U.S. competitiveness.
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Other consortium members included universities, national laboratories, trade and professional nonprofit organizations, state economic development offices, and international partners. The consortium, Hopkins said, has invested more than $50 million in strategic infrastructure to carry out validations for composites manufacturing across the supply chain, from precursor chemicals to composite components and systems.
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The multifaceted approach of the internship program, Hopkins said, has been "demonstrated to be successful in supplementing undergraduate engineering career paths." HOLLINGS MANUFACTURING EXTENSION PARTNERSHIP Next, Raghavan described the work of the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) and what it does to help infuse advanced manufacturing into engineering education.
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, helped test an accelerated 3D printing program for use in manufacturing; that program is aimed at helping small and medium-sized Kentucky manufacturers in the automotive and aerospace sectors adopt 3D technology, in part by providing them with technical assistance and guidance on how to adopt that new technology into their current systems. MEP centers also engage directly with university engineering students to support manufacturing projects, Raghavan said.
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It is a funding program, so that it funds researchers doing work in the area of advanced manufacturing. The specific areas being supported include autonomous systems, biomanufacturing, breakthrough materials and materials design, digital design and manufacturing methods, nanomaterials and nanomanufacturing, novel semiconductor design and manufacturing, and smart manufacturing.
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A typical REU site has a group of 10 or so undergraduates who work in the research programs of the host institution. The RET in Engineering and Computer Science program supports summer research experiences for K–14 educators with the goal of fostering long-term collaborations among universities, community colleges, school districts, and industry partners.
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"I think this field is open," she said. "We do not have enough workers for anything." This makes it vitally important to figure out how to do workforce development, she added, and part of workforce development will be "getting people to realize that manufacturing is cool and sexy." Most people do not realize how interesting manufacturing work can be, using things like robots and 3D printing.
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Pilat responded that MxD, working with its industry partners, has a variety of ways for students to get involved in manufacturing, including apprenticeship programs on digital skills and cybersecurity. "We have a strategic investment planning process where we go out to our ecosystem to understand the technologies that they are working on [for which]
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Next Kurfess passed along an audience question about how the different agencies and organizations interested in manufacturing communicate and collaborate. "We do try to work with each other," Raghavan said, mentioning various organizations that NIST works with, such as MEP centers, an institute at the Department of Commerce, and DoD.
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"It is important for transportability. It is important with understanding what the pathways are to multiple career paths and helping with resiliency." IACMI is working to help "deliver composites manufacturing training that fits into some of those traditional training certificates as well as those that are merging in what is ultimately a more digitally driven manufacturing need space." Raghavan said that certification is a critical part of what NIST is trying to do.
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Those comments and suggestions are collected and organized in this chapter to provide a synthesis of the workshop participants' many ideas about how to create a better future for advanced manufacturing in the United States. IMPROVEMENTS TO ENGINEERING EDUCATION Much of the discussion during the breakout sessions during the workshop's second day was devoted to the question of what changes might be made to engineering education in order to provide a better and more-ready workforce for advanced manufacturing.
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"Many of the students in the 4-year institutions, if there is a lab like an IDEA Lab at Georgia Tech, it's the first time they've seen a machine tool in many cases," he said. "So we've got to somehow correct all of that." One approach to giving K–12 students more exposure to tools and machinery is SME's PRIME (Primary Response in Manufacturing Education)
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"Just getting that hands-on experience through practice so you can thrive once you get that piece of paper is huge," he said. Engineering Curricula In one breakout session there was an extended discussion of the sorts of things that engineering students should learn in their college programs.
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It is incumbent upon engineering education to really catch up to where we are." Undergraduate engineering students do get the chance to develop applied skills through capstone projects, co-ops, research opportunities, and internships, but those are all external to the official curriculum within engineering education. "It is incumbent upon our industry partners
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"Let us teach what we need our students to understand at whatever level that might be. Let us help them … find that niche and what they do well, and then let us help them expand beyond what they are doing." Manufacturing Major Several participants spoke about a manufacturing major or a manufacturing engineering major as one way to prepare students better for jobs in advanced manufacturing.
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But where is the curriculum for that? " In a related thread, Brown commented that one way to teach engineering students so as to prepare them for rapidly changing work is to focus on basic principles of manufacturing.
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In a similar vein, other participants spoke of the possibility of developing a "science of manufacturing." One participant noted, for instance, that there is a clear distinction drawn between computer science and computer engineering, with a balance kept between learning a concept and putting it to practical use. Could something similar be done with manufacturing?
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Familiarity with Systems In one of the breakout sessions, Kimberly Sablon of Texas A&M brought up a particular skillset that will be useful to teach engineering students who are headed into advanced manufacturing. Noting that she had recently moved to academia from the defense sector, where she was the director of Army Science and Technology in the U.S.
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"Manufacturing is one of the main domains where robotics finds lots of use cases and lots of job opportunities as well," he said, and he envisions that there will be ways to integrate robotics and manufacturing in the curriculum in the future. Data Analytics Chris Saldaña of the Georgia Tech said that some of the manufacturing companies he works with are trying to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning, so it will be useful to them to be able to hire graduates who are able to analyze data and, more generally, are comfortable using computer applications to work with data.
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"I think there's a lot of opportunity with the advances that are happening in that space to enhance education," he said, "but the challenge that we have at the university is it's evolving so quickly if we buy into a technology now, they're saying Apple is going to come out with an augmented reality headset later this year, so there's challenges just in the speed at which those technologies are maturing." Still, he said, AR and VR should open up a number of potential valuable opportunities for better connecting industry with academia, and the technologies may prove particularly valuable for smaller schools that cannot afford the sorts of facilities that a place like Saldaña's Georgia Tech can. Thomas Kurfess, also from Georgia Tech, added that many companies are already using VR in their training to give workers a feel for how to control a machine without the risk of doing any damage to the machine or anything else.
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"So it's like a video game for people who are learning welding." VR can also be used to simulate machine tools, he said, so it may be possible that VR-based training tools could be developed for various different kinds of manufacturing technologies, which could lead to better manufacturing education. Kurfess commented that such VR tools could both cut training costs by reducing the use of physical manufacturing laboratories in training and improve safety.
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"It took a six-axis mill and about $20,000 in 1980 dollars to make this part," he said, "and if they would have talked to the metallurgists and the engineers before they actually designed the part and put it as part of the computation, that could have been avoided." The lesson is that the people who design a part need to communicate with the people who will have to build it, and this is particularly important today, with the growing emphasis on modeling and simulation in design. "People sometimes forget that you need to keep yourselves grounded in the reality of what you can actually build." Self-Directed Learners In one of the breakout sessions, there was discussion about the importance of training engineering students to be self-directed learners.
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For instance, Michael Sarpu of Lockheed Martin said that when he went to college, he got a 4-year engineering education for less than $15,000, and his first-year salary was $19,000, so in his first year he made more than it cost him to go to 4 years of college. Now college students may have $100,000 or $150,000 or more in student loan debt when they graduate, he said, and while that may make sense for students going into high-paying jobs, it does not necessarily make sense for students going into engineering.
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One participant, for instance, said that it will be important to change the narrative of what working in manufacturing means. "Students have this perception of manufacturing as this ugly factory type of idea, but that is not what modern manufacturing is," he said.
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There are more than 400 mechanical engineering programs accredited by ABET and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, but only about 50 programs in the United States that are accredited by ABET in manufacturing engineering or manufacturing technology. Industry can help change that, Packer said, by
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This topic is tied to the issue of improving engineering education, as Don Kinard of Lockheed Martin noted, because a stronger manufacturing sector will be more attractive to students. "I think engineering students are smart enough to realize that a lot of manufacturing isn't in the United States anymore," he said.
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They need to have the hands-on experience with manufacturing processes, whether it is using a bandsaw or operating an additive manufacturing process. And, he added, "it is really the students teaching the students.
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Kinard then asked the same question of Michael Sarpu of Lockheed Martin. "Do you feel like, as a country, we have to pick technologies that we are interested and then develop this government, industry, academic kind of connection?
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Later, in the breakout sessions on the workshop's second day, participants returned to the issue of whether the United States should have some type of industrial policy on several occasions. In one session, for instance, Kinard mentioned Denmark and China in particular as two countries that choose desired areas of focus for their manufacturing sector and then fund research and development in those areas.
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"The free-market economy is not going to save us here if we want to make stuff in the United States and we want the jobs and the protection of our supply chain," Kinard said. "People don't realize it, but almost every drug comes from China, and certainly the precursors do.
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"I think it will be useful if more universities got the notion of building multidisciplinary teams in order to attack capstone projects." By contrast, he continued, many of the team competitions that engineering schools participate in -- such as the ones where students design, build, and operate a solar-powered car, say, or a drone -- tend to involve individual students from a variety of disciplines and provide a much better simulation of what students are going to find when they get to the real world. Engineering students need to learn to think beyond simply designing devices to considering whether there is a market for a given device, Romig said.
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APPENDIX B 173 direction through industrial policies and pick fields that the country will focus on, but this generally does not happen in the United States. There are a few exceptions, such as the establishment of Sematech, a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers established in the late 1980s to revive the U.S.
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