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In manufacturing industries, equipment arrangement, and layout design are critical factors that directly influence productivity, workplace safety, and workers’ performance. Link analysis, as a human factors approach, has been widely used in industries for many years to improve layout design and machinery arrangement. This approach considers humans' physical and cognitive capabilities and movement limitations to find an optimal design. Virtual reality significantly impacts our society from product design to worker training. Hence, effective virtual training platforms require the same attention to layout design as manufacturing work settings which offer efficient testing of multiple layouts. This research focuses on developing a virtual 3D printing laboratory for workforce training and has used a link analysis and user perception study to improve the layout of the virtual workplace. The research demonstrates the importance of layout design in virtual training platforms and the potential benefits of utilizing link analysis in optimizing layout design. 

Innovative technologies such as virtual reality and additive manufacturing have been drastically changing our society, from how we design and manufacture products to how to educate and train the next-generation workforce. This paper reviews scientific studies on virtual reality assisted manufacturing education published from 2015 to 2022 from three different perspectives: targeted manufacturing disciplines/topics, virtual environment development, and outcome evaluation methods. This paper also summarizes the critical limitations of existing studies and identifies the key challenges in the field. Furthermore, some future research directions are discussed aiming to advance current manufacturing education and deliver a highly skilled workforce for U.S. future manufacturing. 

The objective of this work is to predict a type of thermal-induced process failure called recoater crash that occurs frequently during laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing. Rapid and accurate thermomechanical simulations are valuable for LPBF practitioners to identify and correct potential issues in the part design and processing conditions that may cause recoater crashes. In this work, to predict the likelihood of a recoater crash (recoater contact or impact) we develop and apply a computationally efficient thermomechanical modeling approach based on graph theory. The accuracy and computational efficiency of the approach is demonstrated by comparison with both non-proprietary finite element analysis (Abaqus), and a proprietary LPBF simulation software (Autodesk Netfabb). Based on both numerical (verification) and experimental (validation) studies, the proposed approach is found to be 5 to 6 times faster than the non-proprietary finite element modeling and has the same order of computational time as a commercial simulation software (Netfabb) without sacrificing prediction accuracy.