CSUN’s winning streak began April 18, when a CECS team took first place in the university division of the Product and Manufacturing Systems Design Contest Challenge. MSEM teams have competed in the competition, sponsored last year by the Small Manufacturers’ Institute, for 15 years. (The annual Manufacturing Challenge contest previously had been sponsored by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.)
The winning project, a hybrid 3D printer, was developed by seven MSEM majors as their senior design project. While there are many 3D printers on the market, the students decided to add a machining feature to theirs. Ordinarily, 3D printing is additive—printers build products layer by layer based on geometry laid out in CAD software. By contrast, traditional manufacturing processes such as milling, cutting and drilling, are subtractive; products are cut from raw materials.
Because the surface of a 3D-printed product is usually rougher than that of a product created through a subtractive process, it requires finish work. Taking that into consideration, the students designed a hybrid 3D printer that included a milling tool to improve the surface quality.
In winning first place, the CSUN team, under the guidance of Bingbing Li, assistant professor of manufacturing systems engineering, beat out teams from 14 other universities and went home with $500 in winnings. But there was another triumph to come: three weeks later, on May 8, the project won the grand prize in the college’s Senior Design Showcase, and the team was awarded a $1,000 cash prize.