Innovative Approaches to Enhance Awareness on Additive Manufacturing in Engineering Education Towards Competencies for Industry 4.0

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies offer numerous solutions to today’s challenges and a variety of applications. Since AM is a promising manufacturing route and is frequently involved with product development, the designing process for such products or parts involves multi-disciplinary teams, such as subject-matter experts and AM processing experts. Often, there is a gap in communication between the two sides occurs in such projects, leading to multiple avoidable iterations that can affect the project resources and outcomes. This study proposes an innovative approach to teach AM for engineers from multiple disciplines to be involved in future projects that integrate AM. The course was designed using three teaching strategies and approaches, which are Design with Additive Manufacturing, Project-Based Learning, and engineering facilitator. The proposed AM accelerated course has proven to be a practical approach that can facilitate the communication process during such projects, resulting in innovative and user-centered solutions. Moreover, the approach is expected to help explore new applications of AM and enhance the AM process workflow in large organizations for spare parts production or product development.