This project provides undergraduate aerospace engineering students in design courses the means rapidly to manufacture accurate prototypes or scale models of parts they have designed, without recourse to skilled labor and well within the time constraints of a one semester course. To do so, the University employs an apparatus (Stereolithographic press ) which can use a CAD solid modeler database, already generated by students in the process of finalizing their designs, to produce prototypes as three-dimensional plastic solids. Three- dimensional printing (stereolithography) is safe, dependable, state-of-the-art technology, well beyond the development stage, and already coming into wide use in industry. This project represents a pioneering use of this new technology, embodied in a commercially available apparatus, as a tool to bring the issue of producibility into the educational experience of engineering graduates. The project is significant because it addresses the urgent national need to strengthen the design and manufacturing content of undergraduate engineering curricula while providing the crucial linkage between those two important aspects of production.
