For over a decade, by a collaboration managed by MIT.nano, MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec), one of many largest universities in Latin America, have labored collectively to develop revolutionary tutorial and analysis initiatives with a selected focus in nanoscience and nanotechnology and, extra lately, an emphasis on design and good manufacturing. Now, the collaboration has additionally expanded to incorporate undergraduate schooling. Seven Tec undergrads are growing strategies to fabricate low-cost, desktop fiber-extrusion gadgets, or FrEDs, alongside friends at MIT in an “in-the-lab” instructing and studying manufacturing facility, the FrED Manufacturing unit.
“The FrED Manufacturing unit serves as a factory-like schooling platform for manufacturing scale-up, enabling college students and researchers to interact firsthand within the transition from prototype growth to small-scale manufacturing,” says Brian Anthony, MIT.nano affiliate director and principal analysis scientist within the MIT Division of Mechanical Engineering (MechE).
By means of on-campus studying, members observe, analyze, and actively contribute to this course of, gaining vital insights into the complexities of scaling manufacturing operations. The product of the FrED Manufacturing unit are FrED kits — tabletop manufacturing kits that themselves produce fiber and which might be used to show good manufacturing ideas. “We’re thrilled to have college students from Monterrey Tec right here at MIT, bringing new concepts and views, and serving to to develop these new methods to show manufacturing at each MIT and Tec,” says Anthony.
The FrED manufacturing facility was initially constructed by a gaggle of MIT graduate college students in 2022 as their thesis undertaking within the Grasp of Engineering in Superior Manufacturing and Design program. They tailored and scaled the unique design of the gadget, constructed by Anthony’s scholar David Kim, into one thing that might be manufactured into a number of models at a considerably decrease price. The ensuing computer-aided design information have been shared with Tec de Monterrey to be used by college and college students. Since launching the FrED curriculum at Tec in 2022, MIT has co-hosted two programs led by Tec college: “Mechatronics Design: (Re) Design of FrED,” and “Automation of Manufacturing Programs: FrED Manufacturing unit Problem.”
New this tutorial yr, undergraduate Tec college students are collaborating in FrED Manufacturing unit analysis immersions. The scholars interact in collaborative FrED initiatives at MIT after which return to Tec to implement their data — significantly to assist replicate and implement what they’ve realized, with the launch of a brand new FrED Manufacturing unit at Tec de Monterrey this spring. The top objective is to completely combine this undertaking into Tec’s mechatronics engineering curriculum, by which college students study automation and robotics firsthand by the gadgets.
Russel Bradley, a PhD scholar in MechE supervised by Anthony, is the undertaking lead of FrED Manufacturing unit and has been working carefully with the undergraduate Tec college students.
“The method of designing and manufacturing FrEDs is an academic expertise in itself,” says Bradley. “In contrast to an actual manufacturing facility, which doubtless wouldn’t welcome college students to experiment with the machines, the FrED manufacturing facility supplies an setting the place you possibly can fail and be taught.”
The Tec undergrads are divided into teams engaged on particular initiatives, together with Growth of an Training 4.0 Framework for FrED, Immersive Expertise (AR) for Manufacturing Operations, Gamifying Superior Manufacturing Training in FrED Manufacturing unit, and Immersive Cognitive Manufacturing unit Twins.
Sergio Siller Lobo is a Tec scholar who’s engaged on the event of the schooling framework for FrED. He and different college students are revising the code to make the interface extra student-friendly and greatest allow the scholars to be taught whereas working with the gadgets. They’re centered significantly on serving to college students to interact with the matters of management methods, laptop imaginative and prescient, and web of issues (IoT) in each a digital course that they’re growing, and in instantly working with the gadgets. The digital course might be introduced by an teacher or accomplished autonomously by college students.
“College students might be studying the speculation with the digital programs, in addition to accessing hands-on, sensible expertise with the gadget,” says Siller Lobo. “You may have one of the best of each methods of studying, each the sensible and the theoretical.”
Arik Gómez Horita, an undergrad from Tec who has additionally been engaged on the schooling framework, says that the know-how that at the moment exists by way of the right way to train college students about management methods, laptop imaginative and prescient, and IoT is commonly very restricted in both its functionality or amount.
“A key side of the worth of the FrEDs is that we’re integrating all these ideas and a module for schooling right into a single gadget,” says Gómez Horita. “Bringing FrED right into a classroom is a game-changer. Our principal objective is making an attempt to place FrED into the fingers of the trainer, to make use of it for all its instructing capabilities.”
As soon as the scholars return to Tec de Monterrey with the academic modules they’ve developed, there will likely be workshops with the FrEDs and alternatives for Tec college students to make use of their very own creativity and iterate on the gadgets.
“The FrED can be a lab in a field, and top-of-the-line issues that FrEDs do is create information,” says Siller Lobo. “Discovering new methods to get information from FrED provides it extra worth.”
Tec college students Ángel Alarcón and André Mendoza are making ready to have MIT college students check the FrED manufacturing facility, operating a simulation with the 2 principal roles of engineer and operator. The operator position assembles the FrEDs throughout the workstations that simulate a manufacturing facility. The engineer position analyzes the information created on the manufacturing facility facet by the operator and tries to search out methods to enhance manufacturing.
“It is a very immersive strategy to train manufacturing methods,” says Alarcón. “Many college students learning manufacturing, undergraduate and even graduate, end their schooling by no means having even gone to an precise manufacturing facility. The FrED Manufacturing unit provides college students the precious alternative to get to know what a manufacturing facility is like and expertise an business setting with out having to go off campus.”
The information gained from the workstations — together with cycle time and defects in an operation — will likely be used to show completely different matters about manufacturing. In the end, the FrED manufacturing facility at Tec will likely be used to match the advantages and downsides of automation versus guide labor.
Bradley says that the Tec college students carry a powerful mechatronics background that provides loads of necessary insights to the undertaking, and past the lab, it’s additionally a beneficial multicultural alternate.
“It’s not nearly what the scholars are studying from us,” says Bradley, “nevertheless it’s actually a collaborative course of by which we’re all complementing one another.”
