Assignment 5a: Research Engineering Advances

Advancement

Describe the advancement in general terms: Metal additive manufacturing is a process of printing 3d objects using metal. This practice has become a very popular choice within manufacturing in the past 5 years due to cost reduction, rapid prototyping becoming more important, weight reduction of parts, and a wide array of other industry-specific advantages. Metal additive manufacturing first surfaced in the 1990s but was very expensive at the time so not many companies could afford to integrate it into their manufacturing process.

What is the problem the advancement solves or proposes to solve? The advancement of metal additive manufacturing has made it possibly to easily design and quickly build parts that were previously near impossible to hand craft using a mill based machine. Being able to 3d print parts out of metal accurately and quickly enables us to design and experiment with new concepts in shorter amounts of time.

Who or what is the group that has the problem? Any company that manufactures metal parts with complex cores and specifically companies that need to do rapid prototyping or groups that have slowed production due to hand or CNC machined parts.

What is the approach to solving the problem? The approach to solving these machining issues is by reversing the processes we used to creat our parts. Metal additive manufacturing creates parts by starting with metal shavings and building it up to be a solid object rather than machining parts off of an solid object to get the final product.

Are there other approaches to solving this problem? The approach to solving these machining issues is by reversing the processes used to create parts. Metal additive manufacturing creates parts by starting with metal shavings/powder and building up to a solid object rather than machining parts off of a solid object to get the final product. Are there other approaches to solving this problem? There are many other ways to go about solving this issue of machining complex parts by using injection molding or even sand casting! Sand casting is a very quick and effective way to create complex cores for a single part and it is a very cheap process, however, sandcasting requires more time in a mass production line because a new mold needs to be created every time you produce a part. Also sand casting would be difficult for rapid prototyping considering you would have to machine/mill the cores out first along with the molds/patterns.

Incorporation

At what stage in the design process could this engineering advancement be beneficial to your overall purpose? The stage in the design process that this engineering advancement could be beneficial to my overall purpose is in the modules phase where it can be utilized in rapid prototyping different variations of modules for a certain concept/purpose.

How does this advancement incorporate into your purpose/design? It would be super beneficial in the ways of creating prototypes for different modules to see which methods work the best to achieve the desired goal. So for my project it would be awesome to quickly 3d print my 3 modules or more if needed in metal so that I can see which methods work best and choose the best working module out of them all or if something needs to be changed it could quickly be re-3d printed.. It is important for me to use metal 3d printing as opposed to plastic so that there is more strength to the material in pushing cat waste throughout the box while scooping.

What aspects of the advancement could you see at first glance? At a first glance the advancement of using metal 3d printing would help to find out if something within my modules are not working, or if the overall design needs to be resized depending on how much space is available to fit my module into the cat box.

What aspects of the advancement could cause a challenge to incorporate into your design? I feel that a challenge that could pop up when incorporating metal 3d printing into my design is not having a large enough print bed. Cat boxes are fairly large and I would need to spend more money in order to get a large enough print bed for any of my modules that are on the length side. Also in considering the size of a cat box I believe there could be alot of waste in material and too much time consumption in creating too many prototypes. This is because for bigger parts more material is required along with a longer print time is required.

What aspects of the advancement could you see after you studied more about the advancement? A tricky thing with aspects of using the advancement is that with rapid 3d printing in doing larder productions the reliability of the process to maintain quality in my parts would go down overtime. Simple errors as small as accidently having a bad calibration could ruin everything produced.

What needs to be determined to integrate this solution into your project? In order to integrate metal additive manufacturing into my design I would need to determine how big of pieces I would need to print, the cost of materials- especially if I am rapid prototyping differen't modules/designs. I would need to know what the tolerances of the printer are and how long it would take for the printer to complete a part.

Resources

1. Reference 1

2. Reference 2

3.Reference 3