Application of 3-D CAD and 3-D Printing to RET Program to Enrich Engineering Design Education

Abstract Starting in 2013, however, Texas House Bill 5 and a new Foundation High School Program was established with an increasing requirement on the design and manufacturing, most of which is outlined in the Career and Technical Education (CTE) section of Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Standard. This in turn necessitates more training for high school teachers who are in great need of learning the state-of-the-art design and manufacturing technology. In 2016, Lamar University (LU) at Beaumont, Texas was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Teachers (RET) site grant titled “RET Site: Incorporating Engineering Design and Manufacturing into High School Curriculum.” The goal of the project is to host 12 high school teachers each summer for three consecutive years to participate in engineering design and manufacturing research and then transfer their experience into high school curriculum. After the successful operations of two years, the LU RET program entered the third year in 2019. This year, we made two major enhancement in the RET summer program: 1) to center the workshop and research activities around the 3D CAD design and 3D printing, which are now readily available to most high schools, and have already made great impact on the design and manufacturing education; 1) to put more emphasis on the connection between the design and manufacturing research experience and the high school STEM course module development so that the participating teachers would not only have more hands-on research experience, but also be able to kick-start the develop the suitable course module for their students. In the six weeks’ program, five LU engineering professors provides morning workshop on six subjects and various research project. The first week we started with the 3D CAD design using Autodesk Fusion 360, which is powerful and popular CAD software commonly used in engineering design. In the following weeks, the teachers got the chance to see the application of the CAD and 3D printing applied in the following research projects guided by the five LU professors: 1) Dr. Liu offered workshops on computer integrated manufacturing systems, focusing on bridging the gap between design and manufacturing, taught the teachers how to use the same CAD platform Autodesk Fusion 360 to create cutting tool paths for CNC machines in order to manufacture the 3D CAD design. The topic of converting the 3D design file into a STL file format and feed into a slicing software to prepare the CAD design for 3D printing was also covered. 2) Dr. Brake led the teachers design a magnetic concrete mix that was used to manufacture a concrete CI core transformer for application in wireless power transfer systems. This work included drawing and printing 3D models to make casting molds for concrete casting. Designing and testing concrete CI cores under 60 Hz AC sinusoidal excitation to determine the dynamic magnetic hysteresis of the concrete transformer. This work could be implemented into a Physics course or an engineering course that places focus on interdisciplinary activities that include multiple disciplines working together- both civil and electrical engineering. 3) Dr. Fan asked the teachers design and 3D printed standard tensile specimen and use the specimen to test the tensile strength of the 3D printed materials. Various 3D printing conditions such as print direction, fill density, etc were used to study the impact of the 3D printing conditions on the achievable strength of the 3D printed parts. 4) Dr. Zhou led the project on synthesis and manufacturing of robots with legged walking mechanisms after delivering workshop on mechanism design and robotics. The workshops start with mathematics foundation for mechanism. Teachers were fascinated by how high school Geometry and Algebra knowledge can be applied to design a simple machinery. 5) Dr. Li’ workshops are on alternative and renewable energy, which cover three most important renewable energy resources: hydroelectric power, solar power and wind power. This is the only subject area where CAD and 3D printing was not directly used, but energy is very important aspect in engineering field, no manufacturing is possible without energy. The workshop broaden the participating teachers’ horizon on the grand energy challenge the entire world is and will continue facing.