Graduate Studies

Design And Manufacturing Program

Time is Right

The global competitiveness and rapidly evolving technologies in computer-aided design and manufacturing have mandated that graduate curricula in mechanical engineering reflect these changes. The continuous pursuit of quality products and shorter product cycles has spurred innovation in product design and manufacturing technologies in recent years. The graduate emphasis in design and manufacturing, initiated in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, incorporates an interdisciplinary approach to design and manufacturing.

Intended Audience

This program is specifically designed to attract both full-time and part-time students who may be
employed in industry, government, and research institutions. It is also appropriate for engineers who are re-directing their career paths in an ever-changing economic environment.

Primary Features of Program

• Core courses specifically designed to expose students to a design methodology that intimately involves consideration of the manufacturing processes.
• A large variety of non-core courses from ME, ENMA, and CS to offer enough flexibility to enable students to chose a study path that matches their own academic and professional
  goals.
• One-credit hour courses taught by guest instructors from industry.
• Hands-on practice with rapid prototyping process, injection molding process and design for
  manufacturing (DFM) software
• Opportunities for co-operation programs

The following is a description of a selection of typical courses.

Engineering Software Applications

This course introduces various engineering software that are useful for engineering ommunication, analysis and design. Particular software included are MSC/NASTRAN for structural analysis and design optimization, P3/PATRAN for graphic applications and STAR-CD for computational fluid dynamics. Design projects will be assigned in the class for students to practice those software.

Concurrent Engineering

This course introduces the principles of Concurrent Engineering to the various stages in a typical
design process ranging from conceptual design to parametric designs. The major emphasis of this course is on the integration of the design and design for manufacturing (DFM) materials. Hands-on experience will be based on rapid prototyping work and software applications of DFM applications to injection molded parts and stamped parts.

Project Course

This course is reserved for students who have an industrial sponsor or a faculty advisor with a
funded project. Examples of past projects are digital image processing of solid objects, telephone pole crawler, and pin pick-up mechanism for bowling alleys.

Facilities

Old Dominion University operates an IBM-RS 600/590 workstation, which has vector processing
capabilities, and clusters of P.C.’s in various laboratories throughout campus. In addition, the ME
department has a SUN network consisting of several SUN workstations, IRIS graphics stations, and numerous microcomputers. The campus-wide computational facilities are interconnected through a high speed network connection (0<3). These facilities are also linked to supercomputers at both NASA Langley and Ames Research Centers and other supercomputing facilities throughout the country. The Mechanical Engineering Department operates a materials laboratory, a fluid mechanics laboratory, a CFD laboratory, a solid mechanics laboratory, and a composite materials and experimental mechanics laboratory. The department maintains a CAD/CAE laboratory with IBM RS/ 6000 workstations and Textronix graphics terminals. The College of Engineering and Technology also maintains a controls laboratory, a robotics laboratory, and a product/process laboratory equipped with a laser scanner for solid object, a rapid prototyping machine, and software for design for manufacturing and for process modeling.

Admission Policy

The program is tailored for those who have an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering or
equivalent. Students with degrees in other engineering or scientific disciplines may be required to
take prerequisite courses. Applications with degrees from accredited programs are required to have a minimum GPA of 3.0 for regular admission. GRE general test results are required of all applicants, and a minimum TOEFL score of 550 is required of all international students. Limited financial aid awards are available to qualified applicants.

Contact

Dr. G. Hou, Graduate Program Director
(757) 683-3728; e-mail: ghou@odu.edu.

Degree Requirements

The program offers a Master’s of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering with specialization in design and manufacturing disciplines. The program requires 30 credit hours of courses after the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering, or equivalent, and may be completed in one calendar year (12 months). Students must take four core courses and six non-core courses to complete the 30-hour requirement. Most of courses are conveniently offered in the evening or on TV. The four mechanical engineering core courses developed specifically for this program are

1. Applied Mathematics for Design and Manufacturing
2. Advanced Design
3. Concurrent Engineering
4. Manufacturing Automation

The remaining six non-core courses can be taken from, but not limited to, the following
approved list of courses:

Note: of the six non-core courses, a maximum of four courses can come from ENMA and/or CS