Coming into this semester with all our classes being online, the many impacts of the COVID-19 crisis were at the forefront of our minds when considering what problem we wanted to tackle for our senior design project. We also wanted our product to have a lasting effect after this pandemic is over. One of the direct impacts within the Mechanical Engineering department at Lafayette was the fact that ME 210 was not being taught in the fall semester as it could not be adapted to remote learning. This was mainly due to the fact that this course has a strong emphasis on manufacturing and requires access to the machine shop. This was a problem because it is paramount that all mechanical engineers are familiar with the basics of manufacturing.
In order to solve this problem, our team designed a low-cost virtual lathe simulator that uses haptic, visual, and audio renderings to give the user the full experience of operating a lathe with integrated tutorials to teach these necessary machining skills. This product would benefit the college because it would allow for ME 210 to be taught remotely in the future, should the pandemic continue into next year. Along the way, our team realized that the scope of our product expands much further than Lafayette College, and both the societal and economic implications reach far past ME 210.
There is also a large need for manufacturing workers. Currently, in the United States, a significant number of manufacturing jobs are going unfilled. Unfortunately, this is a number that is projected to increase over the next decade. A study conducted in 2018 by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute predicts that by 2028, 2.4 million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled, risking the United States $2.5 trillion [11]. The three main reasons that the study gives for this growing issue is that there is a lack of skilled workers due to misperceptions about what manufacturing entails, skillsets are shifting towards advanced technologies, and there is major inaccessibility to formal training. Our product has the potential to address these issues by teaching new skills and encouraging people to enter into an industry that they otherwise would not have considered.
This product would help solve the problem of inaccessibility by teaching machining skills to many students who don’t have access to a machine shop. The average cost of a Clausing Colchester VS-13 Lathe (the model in the machine shop in Acopian) is upwards of $15,000, so many high schools and community colleges can’t afford to have these large, expensive machines. Beyond the purchasing price of a lathe, it is also expensive to operate and maintain it. Parts can break easily if the machine is not handled properly and they are expensive to replace. Our virtual lathe would allow students at institutions with less funding to gain valuable experience despite never setting foot in a machine shop. The virtual lathe could also be used as a learning tool in high schools so that students can learn how to manufacture earlier in their educational careers. This would give the opportunity to many students who would never even consider applying to college or technical school to learn how to manufacture.
The lathe has the possibility to extend even farther and can be an impactful solution to the issue of recidivism. According to the National Institute of Justice, recidivism “refers to a person’s relapse into criminal behavior, often after the person receives sanctions or undergoes intervention for a previous crime” [12]. It was also found that inmates who go through some sort of educational program are less likely to be reincarcerated than those who do not partake in educational programs. In a study conducted by RAND, it was found that for a pool of 100 inmates, implementing some sort of educational program reduced recidivism from 43.3% to 30.4% while also saving the prison system around $900,000 over three years [13]. It was observed that 52% of all inmates in America participate in educational programs while in prison [14]. Our system has the potential to increase prison education participation, thus reducing the number of inmates being reincarcerated each year.
There are also environmental benefits to our product. Many factors need to be considered when analyzing a lathe’s environmental footprint. The paper “An Environmental Analysis of Machining” by Jeffrey B. Dahmus and Timothy G. Gutowski [8] mentions that material removal, material production, cutting fluid preparation, and cleaning all contribute to a lathe’s environmental impact. Thus, using the virtual lathe for practicing and learning how to machine, and only using the real one to manufacture a part once a student is ready would decrease the energy load associated with teaching students how to manufacture.