Virtual Prototyping: A Bridge Between Design And Manufacturing

This paper intends to study integration of design curriculum and manufacturing curriculum via virtual prototyping. Design and manufacturing are two important subject areas in most engineering schools. Various courses are offered in these two areas. However under the current curriculum setting, the design program and manufacturing program have been developed discretely without regard to the potential benefits provided by the integration of both of them due to lack of a curricular bridge to properly link them together. Virtual prototyping, which is also called dynamic motion simulation, is one possible solution to this problem. Virtual prototyping usually is delivered in a computational multibody dynamics (CMD) course. The CMD course is designed to build basic motion and force analysis skills of a student to inform his/her design and make the design ready for manufacturing. Introducing standalone computational multibody dynamics course is the first alternative to tie design and manufacturing together via virtual prototyping. Virtual prototyping can also be included as a section of a computer-aided design /computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) course to link design and manufacturing. A new course entitled Applied Multibody Dynamics was initiated in the mechanical engineering program at South Dakota State University. This new course has addressed the need for engineering design linked to manufacturing. To make the course substantially fulfill its role of a bridge between the design curriculum and manufacturing curriculum, the course outcomes have been tied to the students’ senior design projects. Student surveys and course assessments indicate that the course plan and design provides a promising solution to the need for integration between design curriculum and manufacturing curriculum.