Additive Manufacturing - From 3D Printing to the Factory Floor

Overview

What you will learn

The Additive Manufacturing - From 3D Printing to the Factory Floor course offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will help you learn the fundamentals of additive manufacturing (AM) of metals, polymers, composites, and ceramics, along with those for emerging materials and structures (e.g., electronics, biological tissues).

• Understand the operating principles, capabilities, and limitations of state-of-the-art AM methods, including laser powder bed fusion, fused deposition modeling, stereolithography, and material jetting.

• Become familiar with the complete workflow of AM, including computational design, toolpath generation, build preparation, and characterization.

• Compare and contrast the capabilities of AM with conventional manufacturing methods such as machining and molding in terms of rate, quality, cost, and flexibility.

• Gain hands-on experience with state-of-the-art AM machines.

• Study applications of AM across industries, including aviation/space, medical devices, automotive, energy, electronics, and consumer products.

• Via examples and case studies, understand how to quantitatively assess the technical and economic suitability of AM for an application, and project future trends.

• Place AM in the context of the digital manufacturing infrastructure, including advances in robotics, machine learning, and data science.