Going Back in Time to Improve Design: The Elemental Function-Failure Design Method

Abstract

In today’s world it is more important than ever to quickly and accurately satisfy customer needs when launching a new product. It is equally important to design products that adequately accomplish their desired functions with a minimum amount of failures. When failure analysis and prevention are coupled with a product design from its conception, shorter design times and fewer redesigns are necessary to arrive at a final product design. In this article, we explore the potential of a novel design methodology to guide designers toward new designs or redesigns that avoid failures. The Elemental Function-Failure Design Method (EFDM) is based on functional similarity of the product being designed to failed products within a knowledge base. The idea of using component functionality to explore the failure space in design was first introduced as a function-failure analysis approach by Tumer and Stone (2003). The overall approach offers potential improvement over current failure analysis methods (FMEA, etc.), because it can be implemented hand in hand with other conceptual design steps and carried throughout a product’s design cycle. In this paper, this idea is formalized into a systematic methodology that is specifically tailored for use at the conceptual design stage before any physical design choices have been made, hence moving failure analysis earlier in the design cycle. In the following, formalized guidelines for using the EFDM will be outlined for use in new designs and for redesign in existing products. A function-failure knowledge base, derived from actual failure occurrences for Bell 206 rotorcraft will be introduced and used to derive potential failure modes in a comparison of the EFDM and traditional FMEA for two design examples. This comparison will demonstrate the EFDM’s potential in conceptual design failure analysis.