Farid Solis

MEEN 3349

9/6/17

Manufacturing

The most common types of manufacturing techniques are what I would consider

to be the most useful to know. Metal working such as welding are very common and

very useful to know about, welding in particular is what is interesting to mechanical

engineering majors because that basically requires us to use FEA methods to be able

to more easily solve for some structures whereas just having pins or rollers is very

easily solved with hand calculations. Other useful metal working methods are casting,

annealing, tempering, etc. Some of those methods are more interesting because they

change the properties of the metal with some things as simple as just cooling down a

hot metal slowly as opposed to just letting it cool down normally.

Another method, a much more modern one too, is 3D printing. This method is the

one that fascinates me the most. I remember when it first came to be, at least to the

public eye, less than 10 years ago, and how far it has come in so little time. There are

few things more exciting to me than to be able to come up with something on a CAD

software, such as SolidWorks, and then plug in your computer to a 3D printer and in

just a couple of hours what was once an idea in your mind can be a physical object

you can hold and test or put to use. Even though I have first hand experience with this

method, I own and use one regularly, Id like to use more advanced printers/different

filaments to test the limits of what they can do and what more brilliant ideas can be

made physical in just a matter of hours.