Amritsar College of Engineering & Technology: Pioneer in FDP for Non-Conventional Machining, DME- ACET

Lamp Lightening Ceremony by Dignitaries during inauguration of FDP

We are living in an era wherein markets are led by customers. Today’s customer is more knowledgeable, sophisticated than past. Rightly termed as king of the market, customer has diverging needs. These diverging needs especially the low cost with more features are putting a lot of thrust on companies and creating a competitive environment. With fixed cost of raw material, power, machining and other resources, companies are left with only manufacturing technologies to experiment with.

Manufacturing is one of the fields which have been changed drastically within a decade. Now days, we are adopting some advanced manufacturing methods to meet the customer and market requirements. Researchers, faculty and students should be prepared according to the market needs, due to this rapid development in the technology. Faculty should be aware of the different trends that are being used by the industry along with the research trends in this area.

To keep the knowledge of researchers, faculty and students up to date DME has organized 3-FDP’s recently. Faculty development programme is one of the techniques which provide a common platform to share and exchange the research ideas between the individuals. Mechanical engineering is a very vast field having allied branches like production, automobile, CAD/CAM and so on. Every mechanical engineer should have the knowledge about all the allied branches, because all the branches are interlinked and interdependent. In this context department of mechanical engineering organized a Faculty Development Programme (FDP) on “Emerging Trends in Mechanical Engineering and Research”. The main objective of this FDP was to share the ideas and research of experts from different fields between the faculty members. Research about the composite materials, micro-machining and other emerging trends were discussed during this FDP. Also the expertise about different modeling techniques and research methodology was shared with the faculty members.

After this another programme was conducted on “Numerical and Computational Techniques in engineering”. The scope of this faculty development programme was to introduce the researchers with the different numerical techniques, which are being used in the design of experiments. Also some optimization techniques were discussed with the faculty members and research scholars, which would help them to optimize their experiment results. Being a research scholar in the manufacturing field, one should know about, how to perform the experiments in an optimized way. Thus, this programme helps in providing a basic knowledge about the optimization tools used by the researchers. These tools will be very helpful to the faculty members of mechanical engineering department who are engaged in the research work.

Many of the faculty members of the department are working on non-conventional machining processes like EDM. They are also known as advanced manufacturing processes. Some of the faculty members are pursuing their research work in the field of composites, which are known as the materials of future. The continuous development in the material science, give rise to the new materials which are difficult to machine with conventional machining processes. Now days advanced manufacturing processes are taking over the conventional processes. Also these advanced manufacturing processes give rise to some future challenges for the researchers. So as to share and exchange the ideas regarding advances in the manufacturing processes, mechanical engineering department conducted a faculty development programme on “Advanced Manufacturing Processes: Future Challenges”. The experts from various fields shared their ideas with faculty members about the current issues in the field of advanced manufacturing methods. Also some future challenges were discussed, which gives a gateway to new research ideas to the young researchers. Machining of composites is a big challenge in the industry. So that research work in this area will be very useful to the manufacturing industry. It will enhance the use of composites in the modern industry. Experts shared their ideas regarding the machining of composites along with future challenges with the faculty members.

These types of FDP’s play vital role to keep the knowledge of faculty members up to date. All FDP’s concluded in grand success. DME of ACET has become a hub for such programmes. All programmes organized were sponsored by Punjab Technical University or ISTE. These programmes have laid the strong foundation for research oriented work in the region.