Making 3D printing industrially relevant

Hart describes his chance encounter with additive manufacturing as fortunate.He was asked to teach a class for the MIT Masters of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design program by a colleague in 2013.Hart claims, “I don’t remember what led me to propose that the class focus on additive manufacturing, since I wasn’t yet conducting research in the area.

“I used the class as an experiment to discover a new interest and capitalize on the students’ enthusiasm and curiosity.Feldmann, then in his first semester at MIT, was one of the students in that class.

Students in the project-based class were tasked with improving the properties of 3D-printed parts, measuring the accuracy of those parts, and contributing to lectures that connected 3D printing to manufacturing fundamentals.