Development Of An Interdisciplinary Laboratory Curriculum For Emerging Product Manufacturing

This paper summarizes an effort to develop an interdisciplinary capstone design project course and laboratory in manufacturing. As manufacturing laboratories are very expensive to develop, this program is designed based on distributed and integrated manufacturing processes on campus. As students can gain access to various facilities, they will be able to make various products, including some emerging products, such as EDM machines, fuel cells, etc. As this capstone design project provides opportunities for students to design, manufacture, it stimulates the students’ interest in real-world product realization. Both the program model and actual project implementation are summarized in this paper. This program can also be adapted at other institutions that have limited manufacturing process facilities.