The Sustainable Design and Manufacturing Laboratory (SDML) conducts extensive research on design and manufacturing based on interdisciplinary convergence approach. Current research areas include Sustainable Manufacturing, Smart Manufacturing and Data-driven Design.

Sustainable Manufacturing

In this research area, advanced sustainable manufacturing technologies are developed. In more detail, the mechanical machining processes for difficult-to-cut materials such as titanium/nickel alloys and carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) with the novel lubrication systems using nano-particles have been developed. In addition, the hybrid metal 3D printing system has been built by combining additive and subtractive manufacturing techniques, and the process optimization and real-time process monitoring have been actively studied.

Smart Manufacturing

This research field mainly covers a variety smart factory technologies. Among them, the prognostics and health management (PHM) of mechanical systems that develops advanced process monitoring, fault diagnosis and quality prediction algorithms with big-data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) is a main research topic. Specifically, the PHM for an industrial welding robot, 3D printer, CNC machining center, and injection molding machine has been actively studied. In addition, the AI-based cyber-physical systems (CPS) for the above-mentioned systems have been developed to support effective human-machine interaction (HMI).

Data-driven Design

The new user-centric product design theories and methods have been developed by using user-related mass data in this research field. Several human-centered design methods such as participatory design, design thinking process, and so on have been adopted for the methodological framework. Then, various clustering techniques have been applied to the collected user-related data to draw key information. Those information can be appropriately utilized by participating users and designers during the user-centric design process.