Research-Ability-Orientated Course Design and Cultivation Examples of Numerical Simulation Technology on Manufacturing Processes for Graduate Students

“Numerical Simulation Technology on Manufacturing Processes” is a graduate-level course designed for students majoring in mechanical engineering, especially in manufacturing technology. With the advancement of manufacturing and information technologies, the course has become significantly more applicable and practical for students across various manufacturing fields. To enable students not only to master numerical simulation techniques but also to extract and analyze engineering problems from a scientific perspective, this paper presents the course design, core contents, and representative outcomes as a reference. The main contents include: (1) the course background, target audience, and key instructional procedures, with an emphasis on the rationale behind student presentation sessions; (2) two typical manufacturing process case studies that illustrate how the course systematically enhances students’ research capabilities through the pre-simulation stages of problem extraction and model simplification; (3) a discussion on the application prospects of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as physics-informed neural networks (PINN) and graph neural networks (GNN) in simulation curricula, identifying them as key future directions for numerical simulation technology. Through a comprehensive introduction to this course, we aim to contribute to the cultivation of outstanding research-oriented talents for China’s manufacturing engineering sector, which already holds a competitive edge and having the inevitable requirement for a scientific transformation.