Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing MSc
Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing MSc
The Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing MSc programme is a postgraduate-level taught course aiming to develop in-depth knowledge and understanding of Additive Manufacturing and 3D printing technology. It also aims to teach the ability to apply these methods in a project context, together with training in critical and analytical skills, design of additively manufactured devices, execution of individual research projects and communication skills.
Students on this 12-month course first complete a taught component which is followed by an individual research project. Overall, the programme consists of 120 credits of core courses and the MSc project which contributes 60 credits, making a total of 180 credits. In the taught component, students will take two core two week-long intensive courses delivering the knowledge on the fundamentals and advanced topics in Additive Manufacturing as well as completing a semester-long Group Grand Challenge.
The course is unique in that it will be delivered by world-leading researchers at the Centre for Additive Manufacturing at the University of Nottingham. During the course, students will have access to the Centre’s state of the art Additive Manufacturing laboratory, which boasts an impressive range of AM technologies, and additional facilities hosted by the Faculty of Engineering. The course will be submitted for accreditation by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) and the Institute of Engineering Technology (IET).
What is Additive Manufacturing (AM)?
As a manufacturing technology, AM builds up products straight from digital design information and raw materials without the use of any kind of fixed tooling. The digital and toolless nature of AM offers a range of completely new possibilities that are very exciting to engineers:
- AM allows designers to create entirely new geometries, affording the ability to build up structures with unprecedented degrees of complexity. This is leading to new product generations that are completely unlike what has existed before.
- Because AM doesn’t employ any kind of tooling, each AM product can also be made different, for example tailored to individual users. In industry, this capability is being used to create new generations of highly customised products.
- Since the AM process happens within the build volume of AM machines, which do not necessarily need the support of large factories, AM production may be located where the products are needed, minimising the requirement for logistics
The 3DSnowflake campaign shows off how powerful Additive Manufacturing (AM) is as a manufacturing approach. To showcase this, the project started off by designing a snowflake geometry using the graphics package 3DS MAX. The students then produced over 200 snowflakes in a nylon-type material on an industrial-grade Laser Sintering system at the Centre for Additive Manufacturing. Overall, this process took only three days, from design to the final parts. This level of speed and responsiveness is only possible with AM.
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