TECH 3177 Advanced Manufacturing Processes

HW6. Design and Build a Prototype of a Product using AM Technology

30 points Submit: November 21, 8:00 pm

Overview
Students are introduced to a variety of processes for rapid prototyping and manufacturing
(RP&M). When launching a new product, Rapid Prototype is an important stage in which
design engineers produce the designed part in limited quantity for testing, evaluation (and
correction if needed), before delivering the design for large quantity of production.

Project description
In this assignment, individual students will design a part and print this part in the
Production Lab. Students may use any CAD software package for designing and
modeling the product, but they have to save the file as .stl format and submit to
eLearning. Given that the material usage limitation is 3 in3, I would suggest that you
could design some hollow pieces (a design with hollow features), for example, cell
phone case, wind turbine blade, a flash light holder attached to bicycles or anything you
like to create….

The second task of this project is to estimate the cost for the part produced in the RP
technology. The total cost includes model material cost, support material cost, machining
cost, utility cost, and others (such as the design cost). This is an open-ended question.

How to find machining cost? One approach to estimate the machining cost is
1) Find the 3D machine cost.
2) What is the useful life of the machine?
3) How many printing hours will be used in each year?
4) How long be the part printed?
5) What is the cost of the material?

From the information collected, you can analyze your part cost.

Please include all the costs for building this part. Some information may not be available
at hand right away, and you need to do internet search or use other strategies to find the
information.