Chad Jones, who earned his master’s degree in Systems Engineering from the Engineering for Professionals program in May, was honored at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDTEC-CIE) in August. The Design for Manufacturing and Life Cycle Committee (DFMLC) awarded Jones a Paper of Distinction Award for “Trade-Off Analysis for Time and Power Requirements in an Additive Manufacturing-Disrupted Manufacturing Cell,” which he presented at the conference. Jones is a senior systems engineer at Modern Technology Solutions, Inc. in Huntsville, AL, supporting multiple Department of Defense programs.
Based on Jones’s thesis, the paper examines the challenges—from energy usage to time efficiency—that traditional factories face when they add additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing.
Jones found that incorporating additive manufacturing (AM) processes increased the overall demand for power and the time within the production cell, increasing the cycle times associated with the new capabilities from the AM processes. The study concluded that with slight adjustments and balancing those factors (power vs time), it was possible to attain a similar same production speed while reducing energy demands by about 15% without increasing other production factors such as labor.