What is Manufacturing


This course is about Computer-Aided Manufacturing. WE shall focus only on a small subset of all manufactuirng activities. It is assumed that one hasa reasonable background of basic manufacturing processes, how they operate, what they can do, and what are their limits. The areas of design, manufacturing and production control are often knitted together, and even more so today due to the growing emphasis on concurrent engineering.
The figure below shows the basic roles of these activities.


[source: K.-K Wang, Some emerging manufacturing processes for the 21st century, Procs of the 3rd International Conference on Automation Technology , July 1994, Taipei, Honorary Volume, p 17-23]
Most textbooks classify manufacturing activities as shown below:


Prof Wang proposed that we look at these processes from a more fundamental viewpoint -- the chemical or physical phenomena involved. Using htis scheme, we can get a more 'timeless' classification:


Finally, a fugure that shows roughly the state of the art -- the best surface finish or accuracy that can be acheived by several of the common manufactuirng processes that are used today. You may recall that some of the common microprocessors now use features with geometry of apprximately 0.18 microns.


[Source: Norio Taniguchi, Current status in, and future trend of, Ultraprecision Machining and Ultrafine materials processing, Annals of the CIRP, vol 32/2, 1983, p 573-582]