The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute Technology, Hyderabad (IITH) has set out a new paradigm for manufacturing education in India by launching a first-of-its-kind M.Tech program ‘Integrated Design and Manufacturing (IDM)’.
This innovative program merges manufacturing and design to cater to the demands of the manufacturing sector and to make upcoming engineers more industry-ready.
“The conventional manufacturing sector is currently focused on cost-effective shop-floor operations. So, manufacturing education is tailored to cater to those needs. Engineers are trained in traditional manufacturing methodologies, with little or no focus on design methodologies. However, the Indian manufacturing sector will need to undergo a sea change in the near future, if it is to meet the challenge of India’s development, there will be an increasing need for a versatile workforce.,” said Dr Vinayak Eswaran, Professor and Head of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, IITH.
“To keep pace, Indian manufacturing education needs to provide courses that integrate design with manufacturing and enable students with component and system design, theoretical and computational approaches and new manufacturing methodologies. However, the existing M Tech courses, even in IITs, far less in other engineering colleges, do not cater to this growing requirement,” he added. The course is is a full-time and fractal-based two-year program. The fractal-based approach helps students to gain wide knowledge in analysis, computational techniques, mechanics, design, optimisation, soft computing in addition to traditional courses in manufacturing and production planning.
