Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Monitoring Additive Manufacturing Machine Health, Jeremy Hale

Doctoral Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) allows the production of parts and goods with many benefits over more conventional manufacturing methods. AM permits more geometrically complex designs, custom and low-volume production runs, and the flexibility to produce a wide variety of parts on a single machine with reduced pre-production cost and time requirements. However, it can be difficult to determine the condition, or health, of an AM machine since complex designs can increase the variability of part quality. With fewer parts produced, destructive testing is less desirable and statistical methods of tracking part quality may be less informative. Combined with the relatively more …

Identifying An Optimization Technique For Maker Usage To Address Covid-19 Supply Shortfalls, Michael J. Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) can be purchased for under five hundred dollars. The availability of these inexpensive systems has created a large hobbyist (or maker) community. For makers, FDM printing is used numerous uses.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the needs for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) skyrocketed. COVID-19 mitigation strategies such as social distancing, businesses closures, and shipping delays created significant supply shortfalls. The maker community stepped in to fill gaps in PPE supplies.

In the case of 3DP, optimization remains the domain of commercial entities. Optimization is, at best, ad-hoc for makers. With the need to PPE …