Date of Award

2016-01-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Electrical Engineering

Advisor(s)

Eric W. MacDonald

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) started over thirty years ago and with it a manufacturing revolution that moves industrial production into the personal home. With recent interest shifting into multi-functional parts fabricated through AM technologies, unified systems are being developed. Merging different manufacturing technologies into one single machine is a challenge but undergoing research has shown promise in the development of multi-functional systems. Concurrent work is being done in the software, automation, and hardware aspect of multi-functional systems. An effort to use industry compatible Computer Aided Design (CAD) software to design multi-functional parts including circuits, micro-machining, and foil embedding then exporting and processing automatically to create a hybrid g-code file is being done. The multi-functional g-code files include all the necessary information to create AM multi-functional parts without human intervention in the unified systems.

One advantage of AM is the ability to quickly prototype, extending this advantage to multi-functional parts means that quick multi-functional prototypes can be produce. Modern AM process are also capable of producing end use parts that are ready for commercial use, this leads to the possibility of creating end user parts with multi-functionality. This Thesis explores the challenges and approaches to developing software that interfaces and processes multi-functional CADs and creates files for direct use in multi-functional AM machines.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

97 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Efrain Aguilera Jr

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