Chapter 3 - Overview of the Framework for Integrated Design of Materials, Products, and Design Processes

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the overall design framework and the essential constituents of the framework including robust design, complexity management, and a distributed design framework. It presents a discussion of systems-based design of materials as a design process starting from requirements and ending with the design specifications. Most materials design problems of practical interest involve solutions with property/response sets that conflict in terms of their demand upon material structure at various scales. The chapter describes how to manage complexity in multilevel product and material design. The concurrent design of materials and products provides designers with flexibility to achieve design objectives that were not previously accessible. However, the improved flexibility comes at a cost of increased complexity of the design process chains and the materials simulation models used for executing the design process. Efforts to reduce the complexity generally result in increased uncertainty. A systems-based approach is essential for managing both the complexity and the uncertainty in design process chains and simulation models in concurrent material and product design. The complexity of design process chains is reduced by selectively ignoring interactions between models and between decisions. The chapter also presents two material design examples to demonstrate some of the principles of systems-based robust materials design.