NMIT Advanced Diploma of Engineering Vodcast

Running time: 6 minutes, 15 seconds
Size: 9.5MB

Courses:

• Diploma of Engineering Technology (Mechanical)
• Advanced Diploma of Engineering Technology (Mechanical or Manufacturing)
• Advanced Diploma of Engineering Technology (Principal Technical Officer)

Contact:

• Ian Brownlie
  Phone: 03 9269 8682
  Email: IanB-Mec@nmit.vic.edu.au

Audio Transcript

Welcome to the Advanced Diploma of Engineering at NMIT’s Heidelberg campus.

The advanced diploma course in mechanical and manufacturing engineering is designed to prepare students for careers in a wide range of industries.

To allow employment in many occupations, the course includes subjects in drafting, computer aided drafting, material testing, manufacturing, and robotics.

The conceptual designs and sketching rely on the ability to communicate through graphics, and calculate size and dimension requirements for the particular product.

Students will refer to supplier manuals and text books as well as standards in order to optimise the designs.

The aim is to develop an item before it is manufactured.

The course also teaches students to use computer aided drafting known as CAD software.

Here, computers are used for design, to draw the product, tolerance the dimensions, and determine acceptable loads on the product.

CAD software aids the drawing process and produces high quality drawing, manufacturing, and marketing the designs.

“This basically is a 3D modelling program where students can actually create the parts as a 3D model. The beauty of that is that we can actually apply loads and forces to the part before the parts are actually made so we can actually test out, in theory at least, whether the part is capable of doing the task.” - John Klein, teacher.

For example, this design of a mag wheel determines the three dimensional properties of the product.

Forces will be applied to determine a strong design using the CAD drawing of the wheel.

CAD drawings can then translate to machining programs where computer aided manufacturing produces the product on CNC machines and manufacturing cells.

A production process will be determined and quality control procedures nominated for the creation of a reliable quality product.

Tests are performed on the materials supplied for production as well as the finished product to ensure that all quality expectations are satisfied.

This example is impact testing, where materials are impacted by a force.

As well as hardness testing, tensile testing, and ultrasonic testing, students will learn how to heat treat materials using ovens and protective gear.

Robots are used in engineering to perform a series of repetitive operations, paint products, weld parts together or assemble components.

“We actually use robot studios, you can see there, to get the students up and running and what they will do is go through and actually set up the program, develop it in robot studio and they will then test it and run it in real life.” - Paul Baker, teacher.

The programming of the robots uses dedicated software that will allow the robot to perform a multitude of operations.

One of these students, Ameel Ghani, is amongst many overseas students studying the course this year.

“Very friendly environment. Everybody is like helpful a lot. The workshop, I found pretty helpful. The drafting and the AutoCAD. You know, it’s all about designing.” - Ameel Ghani, student.

Ameel, who has recently come from Pakistan, joins students from Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and South America, who are all studying this year thanks to NMIT’s International department.

Students coming from high school or are applying as mature age students make up the rest of the class.

“What I wanted to get into was drafting and using CAD and things like that. That’s what I mainly wanted to do but most of the other stuff has come in handy as well. There’s a mixture of different age students, mature age students, new students coming straight from high school, international students. I’ve chosen to do the course part-time but you can do it full-time. It’s pretty flexible.” - Erin Holmes, student.

If you are interested in finding out more information about this course log on to www.nmit.vic.edu.au/courses/manufacturing or contact us on 9269 1200.