EML 2322L -- MAE Design and Manufacturing Laboratory

 

 

DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

 

In short, mechanical design is the design of components and systems of a mechanical nature—machines, products, structures, devices and instruments.  Grossly simplified, there are two ingredients of a good designer: the ability to perform the proper analysis from an engineering standpoint and the ability to understand exactly what is involved in making the part(s) required to complete the design.  The importance of these two abilities become starkly apparent when we investigate the true purpose of a designer, which, in the engineering sense, is to select the best proposal given a set of design constraints—often function, cost, reliability and appearance, among others. 

 

Placing a person in the position of a mechanical designer who does not possess both of these abilities is, quite frankly, a recipe for failure.  On the one hand, if the designer lacks the knowledge and experience to carry out the necessary mathematical analysis, the result can be component failure in the very sense of the word.  On the other hand, if the designer is capable of performing the necessary analysis (or consulting someone else who is) yet lacks a basic understanding of what equipment and processes are required to manufacture the designed components, the project is again slated for failure since the components with either be (a) impossible to produce, assemble and maintain or (b) due to the manner in which they have been designed, the components will have an artificially high cost due to the lack of understanding of basic manufacturing techniques on the designer’s part.

 

Michael Braddock
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Director, DML

 


 

 

MISSION STATEMENT

 

The MAE Design and Manufacturing Laboratory opened in the fall semester of 2003.  The primary purpose of this facility is to provide practical, hands-on manufacturing experience to mechanical and aerospace engineering students.  When coupled with the analysis skills and techniques studied in the department curriculum, this manufacturing experience will prove invaluable to those students who desire to become good engineers, as noted above.

 

Specifically, the principle goals of the MAE Design and Manufacturing Laboratory are threefold:

 

1.      To educate students in basic machine tool manufacturing to provide an understanding of what operations are possible with each type of machine.

 

2.      To inculcate a fundamental understanding of how critical proper dimensional tolerancing is to the overall price and method of manufacturing.

 

3.      To force the design students to think about how each component will be manufactured (and the fixturing required) during the design phase.