This class addresses some of the important issues involved with the planning, development, and implementation of lean enterprises. People, technology, process, and management dimensions of an effective lean manufacturing company are considered in a unified framework. Particular emphasis is placed on the integration of these dimensions across the entire enterprise, including product development, production, and the extended supply chain. Analysis tools as well as future trends and directions are explored. A team project is a key component of this subject.

This book provides an introduction to the discipline of aerospace structures and materials. It is the first book to date that includes all relevant aspects of this discipline within a single monologue. These aspects range from materials, manufacturing and processing techniques, to structures, design principles and structural performance, including aspects like durability and safety. With the purpose of introducing students into the basics of the entire discipline, the book presents the subjects broadly and loosely connected, adopting either a formal description or an informal walk around type of presentation. A key lessons conveyed within this book is the interplay between the exact science and engineering topics, like solid material physics and structural analysis, and the soft topics that are not easily captured by equations and formulas. Safety, manufacturability, availability and costing are some of these topics that are presented in this book to explain decisions and design solutions within this discipline.

This course is an introduction to the consideration of technology as the outcome of particular technical, historical, cultural, and political efforts, especially in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include industrialization of production and consumption, development of engineering professions, the emergence of management and its role in shaping technological forms, the technological construction of gender roles, and the relationship between humans and machines.

Students are challenged to design and program Arduino-controlled robots that behave like simple versions of the automated guided vehicles engineers design for real-world applications. Using Arduino microcontroller boards, infrared (IR) sensors, servomotors, attachable wheels and plastic containers (for the robot frame), they make "Lunch-Bots." Teams program the robots to meet the project constraints—to follow a line of reflective tape, make turns and stop at a designated spot to deliver a package, such as a sandwich or pizza slice. They read and interpret analog voltages from IR sensors, compare how infrared reflects differently off different materials, and write Arduino programs that use IR sensor inputs to control the servomotors. Through the process, students experience the entire engineering design process. Pre/post-quizzes and coding help documents are provided.

This course introduces the programming, setup, and operation of CNC turning centers. Topics include programming formats, control functions, program editing, part production, and inspection. Upon completion, students should be able to manufacture simple parts using CNC turning centers.Resources include lectures, supplemental videos, and projects. This coruse was created using the Odigia platform.

Manufacturing processes can be organized by considering the type of energy required to shape the work-piece. In this course, sources of energy considered for machining are mechanical used for cutting and shaping, heat energy such as in laser cutting, photochemical such as in photolithography, and chemical energy such as in electro chemical machining and chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Students, guided by product specifications and a design will decide: 1) When to apply mechanical machining vs. lithography based machining, 2) What type of mechanical machining and what type of lithography based machining to apply, 3) When to employ bottom-up vs. top-down manufacturing, 4) When to choose serial, batch or continuous manufacturing and 5) What rapid prototyping method to select. A logical decision tree will be presented to sort the machining options. Examples from a variety of products ranging in size from nanometers to centimeters will be considered.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Bracero Program. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

15.769 Operations Strategy provides a unifying framework for analyzing strategic issues in manufacturing and service operations. Students analyze the relationships between manufacturing and service companies and their suppliers, customers, and competitors. The course covers strategic decisions in technology, facilities, vertical integration, human resources, and other areas, and also explores means of competition such as cost, quality, and innovativeness.

This course will address operations strategy by building on the concepts of:

Reengineering and process design developed by Dr. Michael Hammer.
Manufacturing strategy as developed in the literature, primarily by people at HBS.
Supply chain design and 3-D concurrent engineering literature as developed in Charles Fine’s book, Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage. Perseus Books, 1999.

The concepts there emphasize the necessity of integrating product strategy, manufacturing strategy, and supply chain strategy. As a result, each of these will be touched upon in the course.

This course introduces students to the theory, algorithms, and applications of optimization. The optimization methodologies include linear programming, network optimization, integer programming, and decision trees. Applications to logistics, manufacturing, transportation, marketing, project management, and finance. Includes a team project in which students select and solve a problem in practice.

Students will work through a manufacturing work flow simulation by making paper airplanes to meet a quota within a specific time frame.  

In this activity, learners explore the question "What is paper?" Learners discover the processes and materials required to make paper while experimenting with different recycled fibers and tools.

Manufacturing

Do you like to design and make things? Are you comfortable working with machines? This industry includes careers in planning, managing, and performing the processing of materials into intermediator final products and related professional and technical support activities, such as production planning and control, maintenance, and manufacturing/process engineering. Careers in the manufacturing industry involve making products, such as food, cars, and household goods. Most occupations in this industry typically require a high school diploma or equivalent, although specific designations range from less than a high school diploma and short-term on-the-job training for occupations such as production worker helpers to an associate’s degree and long-term on-the-job training for camera and photographic equipment repairers.

In the past building prototypes of electronic components for new projects/products was limited to using protoboards and wirewrap. Manufacturing a printed-circuit-board was limited to final production, where mistakes in the implementation meant physically cutting traces on the board and adding wire jumpers - the final products would have these fixes on them! Today that is no longer the case, while you will still cut traces and use jumpers when debugging a board, manufacturing a new final version without the errors is a simple and relatively inexpensive task. For that matter, manufacturing a prototype printed circuit board which you know is likely to have errors but which will get the design substantially closer to the final product than a protoboard setup is not only possible, but desirable. In this class, you'll learn to design, build, and debug printed-circuit-boards.

This class deals with the modeling and analysis of queueing systems, with applications in communications, manufacturing, computers, call centers, service industries and transportation. Topics include birth-death processes and simple Markovian queues, networks of queues and product form networks, single and multi-server queues, multi-class queueing networks, fluid models, adversarial queueing networks, heavy-traffic theory and diffusion approximations. The course will cover state of the art results which lead to research opportunities.

Students learn how engineering design is applied to solve healthcare problems by using an engineering tool called simulation. While engineering design is commonly used to study and design everything from bridges, factories, airports to space shuttles, the use of engineering design to study healthcare administration and delivery is a relatively new concept.

This course studies what makes a good design and how one develops a good design. Students consider how the design of engineered systems (such as hardware, software, materials, and manufacturing systems) differ from the "design" of natural systems such as biological systems; discuss complexity and how one makes use of complexity theory to improve design; and discover how one uses axiomatic design theory (AD theory) in design of many different kinds of engineered systems. Questions are analyzed using Axiomatic Design Theory and Complexity Theory. Case studies are presented including the design of machines, tribological systems, materials, manufacturing systems, and recent inventions. Implications of AD and complexity theories on biological systems discussed.

This course examines quantitative techniques for life cycle analysis of the impacts of materials extraction, processing use, and recycling; and economic analysis of materials processing, products, and markets. Student teams undertake a major case study using the latest methods of analysis and computer-based models of materials process.

Our linked subjects are (1) the historical process by which the meaning of technology has been constructed, and (2) the concurrent transformation of the environment. To explain the emergence of technology as a pivotal word (and concept) in contemporary public discourse, we will examine responses — chiefly political and literary — to the development of the mechanic arts, and to the linked social, cultural, and ecological transformation of 19th- and 20th-century American society, culture, and landscape.
Note: In the interests of freshness and topicality we regard the STS.464 syllabus as sufficiently flexible to permit some — mostly minor — variations from year to year. One example of a different STS.464 syllabus can be found in STS.464 Cultural History of Technology, Spring 2005.

In this activity, students learn about creating a design directly from a CAD (computer-aided design) program. They will design a tower in CAD and manufacture the parts with a laser cutter. A competition determines the tower design with the best strength:weight ratio. Students also investigate basic structural truss concepts and stress concentrations. Partnership with a local college or manufacturing center is necessary for the completion of this project.