Engineering Design Changes Research Articles

Representing engineering design changes in finite element models using directed point cloud autoencoders

In recent years, the importance of digitalization techniques in the field of engineering has grown rapidly and led to many new applications, allowing analyzing, predicting, and reusing data. An essential type of engineering data is related to finite element models frequently used for simulation, where many small geometric changes occur during a product’s development process. These modifications reflect the engineer’s implicit knowledge, as they show the engineer’s decisions during the development process. While numerous approaches exist to formalize geometric information as a whole, representing only the changes between finite element models, and thus engineers’ knowledge, has not been investigated yet. In this work, a representation of geometric engineering changes between finite element models is presented, which is automatically learned from past engineering data. The representation is based on vectors between variants, whose dimensionality is reduced with a novel directed point cloud autoencoder. It is shown that this representation of change preserves similarities and differences between different geometric changes while being suitable as input for further machine learning applications, enabling further use of the acquired knowledge. To summarize, the objective is to learn from changes and their motivations in finished engineering developments and to transfer the insights to future design processes, i.e., to inspire engineers and make processes more efficient and goal-oriented.

IADC Code Upgrade: Data Collection and Workflow Required to Conduct Bit and BHA Forensics to Create Effective Changes in Practices or Design

Summary This paper introduces a forensic workflow that can be used to link drill-bit and bottomhole assembly (BHA) damage to drilling dysfunction. This paper will also discuss the data that should be collected and how it should be processed to enable operational practices and engineering design changes to address these issues. There is a vast amount of data collected in all drilling operations that can be used to improve performance if utilized within an effective forensic workflow. Several drilling forensic case studies were developed and critically reviewed by subject matter experts from across the industry. From the causal analysis for each case study, an assessment was performed on what information was (1) available, (2) required to diagnose the cause, and (3) not available but would have been preferred. The way the team communicated and acted on the data was also documented. By combining the learnings from these case studies, it was observed that a guided approach can improve data collection and lead to a more consistent, accurate, timely, and causal analysis with appropriate remedial actions. The process discussed within has been refined to support data collection for forensic analysis and provides a reference for field- and office-based drilling professionals. These practical guidelines have been developed to offer a foundation for a drilling forensic data collection methodology as well as training for the industry—they have been created such that they can grow organically and will form part of the International Association of Drilling Contactors (IADC) Bit Dull Grading Recommended Practice to support the IADC dull grade manual. In the future, these can be used for developing subsequent industry publications. The work described in this paper is part of a joint IADC/Society of Petroleum Engineers industry effort to revise the IADC dull grade manual.

The Translational and Regulatory Development of an Implantable Microdevice for Multiple Drug Sensitivity Measurements in Cancer Patients.

The purpose of this article is to report the translational process of an implantable microdevice platform with an emphasis on the technical and engineering adaptations for patient use, regulatory advances, and successful integration into clinical workflow. We developed design adaptations for implantation and retrieval, established ongoing monitoring and testing, and facilitated regulatory advances that enabled the administration and examination of a large set of cancer therapies simultaneously in individual patients. Six applications for oncology studies have successfully proceeded to patient trials, with future applications in progress. First-in-human translation required engineering design changes to enable implantation and retrieval that fit with existing clinical workflows, a regulatory strategy that enabled both delivery and response measurement of up to 20 agents in a single patient, and establishment of novel testing and quality control processes for a drug/device combination product without clear precedents. This manuscript provides a real-world account and roadmap on how to advance from animal proof-of-concept into the clinic, confronting the question of how to use research to benefit patients.

Proposta de método para a melhoria do desempenho do sistema de gestão de saúde e segurança do trabalho: ISO 45001:2018. Estudo de caso em empresa multinacional do setor óleo e gás

Occupational accidents and leaves that come with them not only causes a huge impact at client-customer’s relationships, also in companies and government’s financial losses, despite the irrecoverable damage to the victims and its families. The high quantity of accidents registered in Brazil and worldwide prove the relevance of this theme. The companies have been looking for ways to avoid accidents by investing in technologies, engineering design changes and trainings to develop its Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems, increasing employee’s protection. ILO and OHSAS 18001:2007 guidelines plus the adaptation demanded by the modern business, ISO 45001:2018 was published aiming to raise the bar of the OHS Management System’s effectiveness. In this context, the research’s main objective is to propose a method for improving the OHS Management System performance by applying it in a multinational oil and gas company. An Assessment Tool was developed, based on the new standard requirements, to support the companies in the adaptation of its processes. This project suggests a method to measure the OHS Management System’s performance, aiming to generate enough data to support the development of action plans for the improvement opportunities. To summarize, it can be concluded that despite the studied organization studied has been recently OHSAS 18001:2007 certified, a lot of its process still shows improvement opportunities regarding the process adaptation to ISO 45001:2018 requirements, in special support, operation and planning requirements.

A Multiple-Domain Matrix Support to Capture Rationale for Engineering Design Changes

Design changes are necessary to sustain the product against competition. Due to technical, social, and financial constraints, an organization can only implement a few of many change alternatives. Hence, a wise selection of a change alternative is fundamentally influential for the growth of the organization. Organizations lack knowledge bases to effectively capture rationale for a design change; i.e., identifying the potential effects a design change. In this paper, (1) we propose a knowledge base called multiple-domain matrix that comprises the relationships among different parameters that are building blocks of a product and its manufacturing system. (2) Using the indirect change propagation method, we capture these relationships to identify the potential effects of a design change. (3) We propose a cost-based metric called change propagation impact (CPI) to quantify the effects that are captured from the multiple-domain matrix. These individual pieces of work are integrated into a web-based tool called Vatram. The tool is deployed in a design environment to evaluate its usefulness and usability.

Predicting Breaking Wave Conditions Using Gene Expression Programming

The forces and loading resulting from shallow water breaking waves are one of the most important drivers in coastal engineering design and morphological change. The importance of accurately and precisely predicting breaking wave conditions cannot be overstated. Using a novel dataset of laboratory and field scale breaking wave conditions, this study assesses the performance of widely applied empirical relationships for breaking waves and uses newly available artificial neural networks and gene expression programming (GEP) numerical methods to develop an accurate and easily applied predictor of breaking conditions for coastal engineers and planners. A novel GEP model is developed and shown to: provide excellent predictive ability at all scales, greatly improve prediction compared with previous works at laboratory scale, and clearly identify the relevant importance of seafloor slope and the water depth to wavelength ratio.

A Methodology for Predicting the Effect of Engineering Design Changes

To sustain competition, it is necessary for designers to contrive changes in a product. These changes are often denoted in literature as engineering changes. The engineering changes when committed, can have percolating effects on other design aspects of the product, manufacturing processes, machines, materials, labor, operating time and cost. In order to implement an engineering change, it is necessary for designers to predict the effects on different stages of product development. We developed a methodology that would help in predicting the effects of engineering changes on the product and the manufacturing environment. In our work, we simplify the product and manufacturing environment into simple parameters that are imposed in a Design Change Prediction Matrix (DCPM). The matrix also stores the dependency between these parameters. Using the matrix, we developed an algorithm that would lead to development of a prediction tool in future.

Deairing Techniques for Double‐Ended Centrifugal Total Artificial Heart Implantation

The unique device architecture of the Cleveland Clinic continuous-flow total artificial heart (CFTAH) requires dedicated and specific air-removal techniques during device implantation in vivo. These procedures comprise special surgical techniques and intraoperative manipulations, as well as engineering design changes and optimizations to the device itself. The current study evaluated the optimal air-removal techniques during the Cleveland Clinic double-endedcentrifugal CFTAH in vivo implants (n = 17). Techniques and pump design iterations consisted of developing a priming method for the device and the use of built-in deairing ports in the early cases (n = 5). In the remaining cases (n = 12), deairing ports were not used. Dedicated air-removal ports were not considered an essential design requirement, and such ports may represent an additional risk for pump thrombosis. Careful passive deairing was found to be an effective measure with a centrifugal pump of this design. In this report, the techniques and design changes that were made during this CFTAH development program to enable effective residual air removal and prevention of air embolism during in vivo device implantation are explained.

Cloud Based HPC for Innovative Virtual Prototyping Methodology: Automotive Applications

The objective of the paper is to describe how the cloud based HPC services help to investigate the behavior of automotive part components involved in structural crash and NVH test simulation.Currently, market requirements related to vehicle weight reduction and cost cutting are driving the industry to accelerate their innovation and to introduce new design and new material and manufacturing processes. The challenge for supply chain is to handle conflicting requirements and bring revolutionary changes to vehicles, while at the same time cutting the development costs and time drastically.Business scale-up is one of the main competitiveness factors. This required mastering an efficient and flexible process for customization and localization. Divergence of the models are inherent phenomena with the current silo approach due to the complexity of the interactions; CAD-CAE, CAE-CAE.Methodology: To answer this challenge, we will apply Virtual Prototyping with a rather holistic view, several full vehicle simulation models all based on one unique central Body In White subsystem, named the Single Core Model approach. This disruptive approach will enable to support collaborative decision making process during the Product Development phase; including engineering stakeholders from 3 different disciplines: Crash & Safety, Durability, NVH. The use of HPC cloud services will also be a huge benefit for multi-site companies. Indeed, Gestamp R&D Centers located in Spain, France and Sweden have increasing needs in handling projects over several locations. Therefore, the HPC enables to access and share the data, to run simulations and to analyze the results in all the relevant locations through a conventional web browser. In summary, this HPC cloud application will enable a more efficient project handling by reducing data transfer time and by improving the communication between the different stakeholders of a project.Limitations of this study: Therefore, this innovative development methodology calls for extensive computer resources, which was considered as a major obstacle to go through this experience. Cloud Computing seems to be the ad-hoc solution as of today for fast growing manufacturing companies like GESTAMP. This is a major enabler; it offers the necessary flexibility to access to HPC resources when it is needed at an affordable cost.Results: The experiment was run on extreme factory, Bull's HPC on-demand compute service, which gave Gestamp the easiness, performance and flexibility that they needed to perform their work.Conclusions: This experiment is part of European FP7 – Fortissimo project, it showed how to avoid last minute engineering design changes, and it should result in improved competitiveness in order to reduce the development period, to shortening time to market, to improve quality at competitive pricing.

Engineering Product and Process Design Changes: A Literature Overview

Engineering product/process design changes are unavoidable and necessary for improvement & innovation. To capture the maximum market shares, manufacturers have to effectively and efficiently manage engineering changes throughout the entire product life. In this paper a comprehensive literature review on engineering change management in product/process perspective is presented. Engineering design changes can be taken in both aspects, such as an opportunity or as a burden. Different methods have been proposed by the researchers for better understanding of engineering change phenomenon. The insight regarding the changes propagation during the engineering design is crucial because a large number of artifacts are results of the predecessors. This article discusses the significant aspects of engineering changes, product architecture, propagation paths and highlighted the methods and tools that are proposed by the researchers. This paper will help researchers and managerial staff to get an idea and awareness about the change propagation and its impact. The review shows the prominence of engineering change management and concluded that the interest in the research field is escalating gradually.

Scheduling of Changes in Complex Engineering Design Process via Genetic Algorithm and Elementary Effects Method

Engineering design changes constantly occur in a complex engineering design process. Designers have to put an appropriate procedure in place to handle these changes in order to realize successful product development in a timely and cost-effective manner. When many change propagation paths are present, selection of the best change evolution paths and distribution of change results to downstream tasks become critical to the progress management of the project. In this paper, based on the available change propagation simulation algorithm, a global sensitivity analysis method known as elementary effects (EE) is employed to rank the importance of each potential propagation path with those involved design dependencies in the process. Further, an EE-based heuristic design dependency encoding method is applied to the genetic algorithm which is then adopted to schedule the change updating process. Finally, the optimal results obtained by the complete search and the heuristic dependency encoding methods are compared to illustrate the improvements and effectiveness of the latter method.

Social tagging as a knowledge collecting strategy in the engineering design change process

This article focuses on analysing the feasibility of using social tagging as a tool for knowledge collection and retrieval in the context of the product development process (PDP). This process is a social activity that involves groups of individuals who share a common goal: 'to design a product'. Traditional knowledge-based systems (KBS) are not very well suited to capture the tacit knowledge that is embedded in this process. Social tagging is proposed in this article as the mechanism to externalize the tacit knowledge about the best CAD modelling strategies between the design team members. This knowledge is especially relevant for the management of 'engineering change orders' because this process is closely related to the modelling methodology used to create the three-dimensional (3D) CAD models that have to be adapted to accomplish a specific design modification. In order to analyse the feasibility of this approach, an experimental study was conducted to understand the tagging process in this context and the benefit of using this information in the modification procedure of 3D CAD models. Preliminary experimental results show that tagging represents a feasible approach to support knowledge collection on best CAD modelling practices.

The Measurement of Water Bursting Volume of Jianfeng Mountain Tunnel and Treatment Techniques of Water Bursting

The measurement of tunnel water inflow is not only an important basis for engineering design changes, but also an effective verification of design. This paper combines with the analysis of the measured data of groundwater of large water inflow section, which appeared in the construction of high-speed Jianfeng mountain super long tunnel in Fuling Fengdu, Chongqing city, and detailed information of hydrological survey results. This paper has re-evaluated the engineering geology and hydro-geological of large gushing sections to clear the reason of water inflow, the development trend characteristics of groundwater and stability of surrounding rock. It is shown in this paper that the measures such as strengthening the support parameters, optimizing the waterproof and drainaging design schemes, and other measures can be adopted to ensure the safety of tunnel construction and effectively realize the concept of dynamic construction.

A method for engineering design change analysis using system modelling and knowledge management techniques

Engineering design change management is very important to the success of engineering product development. It has been recognised that the earlier change issues are addressed, the greater product lifecycle costs can be saved. However, in practice, most engineering changes happen in the manufacturing phase, the later phase of product development. Change issues happening in the design phase, especially between the functional and the structural domains, have been a research focus in recent years, and thus there is significant research work that has been carried out to resolve early engineering change issues from different perspectives. This article presents a novel methodology that has been developed to help designers trace, analyse and evaluate engineering changes occurring in the product design phase. A modelling method is employed to enhance the traceability of potential design changes occurred between the functional and structural domains of design. Based on functional and physical models, a matrix-based method is developed to analyse change propagations between components and help find out design conflicts arising from design changes. A knowledge-based method has been proposed to resolve design conflicts by reusing previous design change knowledge. An industrial example about changes of a wind turbine cooling system has been used to help understand the methodology and prove its usefulness.

A Model-driven and Knowledge-based Methodology for Engineering Design Change Management

AbstractChange management is very important to the success of new product development. The earlier that change issues are addressed, the greater that product lifecycle costs can be saved. This paper presents a novel methodology that has been developed to help designers trace, analyse and evaluate engineering changes occurring in the product design phase. A modelling method is employed to enhance the traceability of potential design changes occurring between the functional and structural domains of design. Based on functional and physical models, a matrix is developed to analyse change propagations and help identify design conflicts arising from design changes. A knowledge based methodology has been developed to resolve design conflicts by reusing previous design change knowledge. A wind turbine for power generation from the collaborating company is used to evaluate the developed methodologies.

Engineering Design and Conceptual Change in Science: Addressing thermal energy and heat transfer in eighth grade

The purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of engineering design classroom activities on middle‐school students’ conceptions of heat transfer and thermal energy. One eighth‐grade physical science teacher and the students in three of her classes participated in this mixed‐methods investigation. One class served as the control receiving the teacher’s typical instruction. Students in a second class had the same learning objectives, but were taught science through an engineering design curriculum that included demonstrations targeting specific alternative conceptions about heat transfer and thermal energy. A third class also used the engineering design curriculum, but students experienced typical demonstrations instead of targeted ones. Conceptual understandings of heat transfer and thermal energy and attitudes towards engineering were assessed prior to and after the interventions through interviews, observations, artefact analysis, a multiple choice assessment, and a Likert scale assessment. Results indicated that the engineering design curriculum with targeted demonstrations was significantly more effective in eliciting desired conceptual change than the typical instruction and also significantly more effective than the engineering curriculum without targeted demonstrations. Implications from this study can inform how teachers should be prepared to use engineering design activities in science classrooms for conceptual change.

A Knowledge-Based System for Product Design with Modules

In the paper, the knowledge-based architecture for product design with modules is suggested, which discovers and shares the product knowledge and design rules to increase the effectiveness/efficiency of the product design with modules. This solution approach involves modeling modular products knowledge, modular components selection, and feasible sequence of assembly. In modular products knowledge model, an object-oriented approach is introduced to capture the knowledge of modular product. In modules selection and feasible sequence of assembly, a reasoning mechanism is fabricated based on Protegee and JESS expert tool. Last, a particular case of bicycle design is studied through the use of this knowledge-based prototype system to prove the effectiveness/efficiency of product design with modules. However, a knowledge-based system of product design with modules is also implemented to provide adaptive design rules and share design knowledge in distributed environment. It will greatly enhance the competitive capability of companies trying to reduce the engineering design change.

FAST ERGO_X – A tool for ergonomic auditing and work-related musculoskeletal disorders prevention

Work-related musculoskeletal disorders associated with repetitive and strenuous working conditions continue to represent one of the biggest occupational problems in companies. Despite the variety of efforts to control them, including engineering design changes, organizational modifications and working methods training programs, work-related musculoskeletal disorders account for a huge amount of human suffering and economic costs to companies and to healthcare systems. This paper presents an ergonomic analysis tool, FAST ERGO_X, designed to support ergonomic auditing activities related with work-related musculoskeletal disorders. This tool can be used to analyze workplaces regarding potential ergonomic risk factors. The FAST ERGO_X is a fuzzy expert system designed to help the identification, assessment and control of the risk factors present in the work system, due to lack of adequate ergonomics. Based on objective and subjective data, the system evaluates the risk factors that can lead to the development of work-related musculoskeletal disorders, and presents the findings resulting from such evaluation. The system also presents recommendations to eliminate or at least reduce the risk factors present in the work situation under analysis.

Engineering design change management

Outlines the economic consequences of changes that are made during the design process and manufacture. Computer and paper based systems are considered, and the advantages of a computer based system are discussed. Experience in the use of a computer based system in a company is reviewed with respect to the sources of design changes, the control of design changes and the benefits gained. The use of bespoke and proprietary software is briefly discussed. Notes that engineering design change management plays an essential role in successful manufacturing organisations. Also notes that the bespoke system described has led to a considerable improvement in the company’s change control process.

Temporal representation and reasoning for workflow in engineering design change review

Workflow management, which is concerned with the coordination and control of business processes using information technology, has grown from its origins in document routing to include the automation of process logic in business process reengineering. Workflow also has a strong temporal aspect; activity sequencing, deadlines, routing conditions, and scheduling all involve the element of time. Temporal expert systems, which use knowledge-based constructs to represent and reason about time, can be used to enhance the capabilities of workflow software. This paper presents a temporal expert system workflow component for tracking engineering design changes. The authors use Allen's theory of temporal intervals in their model to enhance the decision-making, timing, and routing activities in a workflow application. They test the model using information from a "real-world" engineering design situation and suggest further research opportunities.