Application of preference set-based design method to multilayer porous materials for sound absorbency and insulation

Abstract

Handling uncertainties at the early phase of design is of great importance for front-loading product development. Designers often have preferences for design parameters of a design object even if they include uncertain information. The present study proposes a new set-based design approach for the early phase of design that intrinsically contains various sources of uncertainties. The proposed design approach, a preference set-based design (PSD) method, obtains a ranged set of feasible design solutions while incorporating the designer's preference for design parameters represented as preference functions instead of a single-point solution under design uncertainties by eliminating infeasible and inferior subsets of solutions. The present study applies the PSD method to a material design problem of a multilayer sound absorption/insulator including porous material. It is difficult to predict the performance because of a number of design parameters such as Biot parameters (i.e. porosity, density, tortuosity, flow resistivity, viscous characteristic length, loss factor and Poisson's ratio of a material) and production tolerance. We develop a performance prediction system based on the PSD method that can obtain the ranged set of design solutions that satisfy the ranged sets of performance requirements through set-to-set space mapping from design space to performance space and space narrowing to eliminate infeasible design subspaces. Through the application of design of the material design problem, the advantages of the PSD method for obtaining the multi-objective solution under design uncertainties toward front-loading product development are discussed.