3D Printing for Innovative Engineering Solutions "The Environmental Challenge"

For decades, the value of hands-on experience in engineering education has been recognized, emphasized, and understood. However, establishing and operating a successful hands-on experience, particularly with new emerging technologies such as 3D printing is a challenging endeavor. 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, allows the creation of tangible objects from a digital geometrical representation by sequentially adding materials layer by layer. Many industries have adopted this technology for its design flexibility, application specific materials availability, and ease of use compared to other manufacturing methods. Although most of the major industrial engineering projects are multidisciplinary, the majority of existing undergraduate engineering curricula do not provide adequate opportunities for students to interact and collaborate with students from other majors to solve real-world technical interdisciplinary challenges, similar to what they will most probably have to deal with after graduation. This paper details the efforts of a group of faculty and students at Texas A&M University at Qatar to develop and implement a multidisciplinary extracurricular activity (short course) on 3D printing for environmental applications. The activity takes place over the course of five days and focusses on introducing students to a systematic approach to solve realworld environmental issues and problems, such as global warming and pollution management. In the beginning of the course, enrolled students are introduced to three different need statements, CO2 capturing, NOx emission control, and Odor emission control. Then they are asked to form three interdisciplinary teams based on their interest in one of the need statements. To ensure that they are equipped with the required tools to device their innovative solutions, the students are exposed to the basics of CAD modeling and 3D printing. They also tour the 3D printing lab to receive hands-on training on how to operate polymer and ceramic 3D printers in particular. Inspired by the generic product design and development process, students are encouraged to articulate a list of customer needs and specifications of their product/s before they begin brainstorming concept solutions for their assigned need statement. In the last two days of the course, the students go over different iterations of prototyping and testing of their conceptual design/s against some given performance indicators like pressure drop and mixing efficiency to select the optimal concept solution. This work was piloted successfully with 12 students from different engineering majors. The teams presented their final concept solutions in front of jury of academic and industrial experts in the field. Students work and presentations were scored based on a predefined rubric which was given to students prior to conducting their presentations. Some of the work is expected to lead potentially to a patent.