Engineering Design Teams Research Articles

Durability as a techno-socio-economic concept

AbstractWhile the “useful life” of products plays an important role in the balance of sustainability and lifecycle assessment, the concept of durability, as the main measure of useful life, is still ill-defined. This paper critically considers the limitations of the current definitions and approaches to durability, by reflecting on the complex interactions of the viewpoints of engineering design teams, users, society and business economics. A new definition is proposed for durability relating to the useful life goals for a product within its techno-socio-economic context.

A Peristaltic Pump to Improve Bladder Emptying and Irrigation in Patients Who Use Clean Intermittent Catheterization

Background: Neurogenic bladder patients who intermittently catheterize may have systems that drain slowly and incompletely. These limitations can lead to urinary tract infections and bladder stone formation and be time consuming. We hypothesize that a catheter accessory device could improve drainage, reduce residual bladder volume, and save time. Methods: A yearlong collaboration between an undergraduate biomedical engineering student design team and client mentors from the pediatric urology department led to an evaluation of solutions to enhance emptying of bladders that require intermittent catheterization. Students performed market analysis, identified design requirements, generated design concepts, conducted usability testing, and constructed alpha and beta prototypes verified through benchtop experimentation during the yearlong project. Prototypes were verified using a phantom bladder model built from a compliant stress ball with an attached catheter and placed under an external pressure of 5 cm H 2 O. Tests were conducted to measure the diff erence between passive drainage and device-assisted drainage at various bladder volumes and catheter sizes. Eight student peers compared passive emptying, irrigating, and aspirating a phantom bladder model using the prototype or syringe to assess the usability of the device. Results: We developed a pump that interfaces with commercially available catheters. The pump housing was designed and 3D printed. Fluid can be moved bi-directionally with a battery-powered peristaltic pump and microcontroller. The pump has a built-in current sensing threshold with an automatic shutoff safety mechanism. Testing results showed that for all bladder volumes and catheter sizes, the pump emptied more completely and drained between 1.6 and 6.3 times faster when compared to passive drainage. Usability feedback showed that the pump required less time to irrigate the bladder and was preferred when compared to the manual syringe technique. Conclusions: This portable catheter pump improves phantom bladder emptying by increasing flow rate, decreasing residual volume, and making irrigation easier. Future design improvements will work to implement safety mechanisms and miniaturize the pump. This project demonstrates the feasibility of a catheter accessory device to improve patient quality of life and the ability for understudied clinical problems to be addressed through collaborations between capstone engineering design teams and physicians.

Exploring technical college student’s collaborative problem solving and teamwork skills in multi-educational level engineering design teams

ABSTRACT Manufacturing engineers work in teams with a wide range of skills and credentials. Teamwork and collaborative problem solving (CPS) skills enable higher productivity and efficiency. However, these skills are largely absent from engineering education curricula and research in contexts involving multi-educational teams inclusive of technical college engineering students. We address this gap in research and practice through a qualitative case study exploring the contributions, experiences, and perspectives of technical college students working in multi-educational level teams to solve real-world engineering manufacturing problems. Data analyses resulted in six themes: (1) positive team culture, (2) valuing industry skills, (3) sharing responsibilities to iteratively make changes, (4) applying technical roles, (5) peer interactions, and (6) career preparation. Technical college students’ perceptions of challenges and successes are also discussed. Results imply that to effectively promote CPS and teamwork in similar contexts educators and industry leaders should consider the importance of (1) valuing students’/workers’ current professional identities while promoting productive conflict, (2) respecting differing team roles while encouraging skill development, and (3) fostering future career skills.

An Exploration of the Relationships Between Cognitive Style, Psychological Safety, and the Paradigm-Relatedness of Design Solutions in Engineering Design Teams in Education

Abstract Thomas Kuhn revolutionized how we think of scientific discovery and innovation when he identified that scientific change can occur on a continuum from incremental developments to drastic change in the form of a paradigm shift. In engineering design, both types of scientific change are critical when exploring the solution space. This study investigates this gap under a psychological safety lens through an empirical study with 64 engineering design student teams over the course of a 4- and 8-week design project. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of cognitive style using KAI scores, derived from Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation (A-I) theory, on the paradigm-relatedness of ideas generated by individuals and teams. Our results identify that cognitive style may not have a direct relationship to the paradigm of ideas an individual generates, or a team selects and develops. Similarly, both individual perceptions and team psychological safety do not predict the paradigm of ideas generated or selected in a team. The results instead identify that the availability of ideas in each paradigm is the primary driver for teams selecting a higher ratio of these ideas during concept screening. These results highlight that cognitive style at the individual and team levels may not be of paramount importance for developing paradigm-challenging ideas, and that teams should instead turn their focus to developing strategies to generate more ideas within the paradigm that fits best with the desired goals of the design tasks.

The Impact of Gender on Individual Perceptions and Team Psychological Safety in Engineering Design Teams in Education

AbstractImproving team interactions in engineering to model gender inclusivity has been at the forefront of many initiatives in both academia and industry. However, there has been limited evidence on the impact of gender-diverse teams on psychological safety (PS). This is important because psychological safety has been shown to be a key facet for the development of innovative ideas, and has also been shown to be a cornerstone of effective teamwork. But how does the gender diversity of a team impact the development of psychological safety? The current study was developed to explore just this through an empirical study with 38 engineering design student teams over the course of an eight-week design project. These teams were designed to be half heterogeneous (either half-men and half-women, or majority men) or other half homogeneous (all men). We captured psychological safety at five time points between the homogeneous and heterogeneous teams and also explored individual dichotomous (peer-review) ratings of psychological safety at the end of the project. Results indicated that there was no difference in psychological safety between gender homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. However, women perceived themselves as more psychologically safe with other team members who identified as women in comparison to their ratings of team members that identified as men. Women also perceived themselves to be less psychologically safe with men than men felt toward team members that identify as a woman. While males did not experience any significant differences in their perceptions of psychological safety toward any gender, the results from the perspective of women still indicate a discrepancy in perceptions between genders. These results point to the need to further explore the role of minoritized groups in psychological safety research and to explore how this effect presents itself (or is covered up) at the team level, as well as investigate impacts on all-women teams.

Numerical Investigation of the Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating (ICRH) Physics in DTT

An extensive linear analysis of the ICRH propagation and absorption in DTT full heating scenario has been performed by means of three advanced numerical tools: DISEMAG, FELICE and TORIC. The numerical codes solve respectively the full dispersion relation in the complex domain of the wavenumber (DISEMAG) and the integro-differential equation that accounts for the correct evaluation of the ICRH power absorption in a slab plasma (FELICE) and in the tokamak equilibrium configuration (TORIC). Moreover, by incorporating the antenna conceptual design, as released by the engineering design team, in FELICE and TORIC, the power spectrum, radiated by the antenna (3 straps) and coupled to the plasma, has been evaluated in the case of 60 and 90 MHz (3He and H minority heating respectively). By extensively using the abovementioned suite of codes, and after establishing the plasma target (fixing tokamak dimensions, density, temperatures, plasma current, magnetic field, isotopic composition, etc.), and the antenna characteristics (number, dimension, pitch, and radial position of the straps, antenna size, etc.), the power absorption on the various species (electrons, majority and minority ions) has been calculated as function of the minority concentration, parallel wavenumber, frequency, harmonic resonant layer, etc.. Comparison between the codes DISEMAG and TORIC in evaluating the absorption on electrons and minority ions has also been performed and shows a good agreement of the results. A new ion heating scheme based on three ions mixture has also been proposed in DTT.

NOVICE DESIGNERS' USE OF PROTOTYPES AS COMMUNICATION TOOLS

AbstractPrototypes are critical design artifacts, and recent studies have established the ability of prototypes to facilitate communication. However, prior work suggests that novice designers often fail to perceive prototypes as effective communication tools, and struggle to rationalize design decisions made during prototyping tasks. To understand the interactions between communication and prototypes, design pitches from 40 undergraduate engineering design teams were collected and qualitatively analysed. Our findings suggest that students used prototypes to explain and persuade, aligning with prior studies of design practitioners. The results also suggest that students tend to use prototypes to justify design decisions and adverse outcomes. Future work will seek to understand novice designers’ use of prototypes as communication tools in further depth. Ultimately, this work will inform the creation of pedagogical strategies to provide students with the skills needed to effectively communicate design solutions and intent.

Modelling of the complete heat flux deposition on the CFETR first wall with neon seeding

Steady-state heat flux deposition on the first wall of the Chinese Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR) is investigated for 1 GW fusion power and under the updated design scheme. The computation is accomplished by the modelling of two simulation systems: SOLPS-ITER and PFCFlux. Seeding neon (Ne) gas is considered to be one of the possible methods of protecting the CFETR divertor from high heat flux damage. Simulations with different Ne seeding rates were carried out on a standard divertor with a lower single-null configuration to determine the effect of Ne seeding on heat flux deposition on the first wall. A blob-based transport model was used to investigate the effect of enhanced cross-field transport on the CFETR first wall, as with ITER and EU DEMO simulations. This work establishes a potential method for simulating the complete heat flux deposition on the first wall for the CFETR steady state by SOLPS-ITER and PFCFlux. After modelling and energy analysis, the peak value of complete heat flux on each module of the CFETR first wall is obtained, which may provide the basic reference for the CFETR physics and engineering design team. The CFETR first wall module which receives the highest heat flux has also been identified, and Ne seeding has a positive effect on reducing the heat flux on the CFETR first wall from around 2.5 MW m−2 to 1 MW m−2, which is within the engineering requirement.

Exploring systemic factors creating uncertainty in complex engineer-to-order supply chains: Case studies from Norwegian shipbuilding first tier suppliers

While it is recognised that there are varying uncertainty characteristics between industry sectors, there is little uncertainty research directly related to engineer-to-order (ETO) systems. A novel method is developed to identify the factors contributing to uncertainty in shipbuilding first-tier suppliers that inhibit the effective and efficient delivery of ETO products. The empirical data set comes from case-specific workshops involving cross-disciplinary staff from engineering, production, purchasing, planning and sales. The protocol included presentations by the researchers and the company, tours of the shopfloor and interactive sessions. The latter used ‘brown-paper’ exercises to map customer penetration-point locations, identify where uncertainties occurred and evaluate their impact-likelihood. The customer penetration-point mapping identified two ETO types; redesign-to-order (RTO) and innovate-to-order (ITO). The major challenges faced by ITO systems are caused through failures in (a) properly understanding customer requirements and translating those to product specification, (b) providing capacity and capability in engineering design teams at both first- and second-tier suppliers, (c) managing interfaces from customer through to second-tier suppliers. Engineering processes in RTO systems have poor customer configuration protocols leading to complex, overengineered products without pre-existing bill of materials. Engineering and production processes at both first- and second-tier RTO suppliers have extended lead-times with poor capacity availability. A change programme is suggested to reduce uncertainty requiring primary consideration of process and control aspects before addressing demand-side and then supply-side changes. The findings are evaluated by independent interviews indicating that the method and tools adopted have validity, and that the findings are commensurate with wider industry expectations.

Intersecting Engineering and Literacies: A Review of the Literature on Communicative Literacies in K-12 Engineering Education

Given the increased attention on pre-college engineering education and its disciplinary nature pertaining to language, discourses, and communicative practices, this state-of-the-art literature review focused on findings of research articles informed by qualitative and quantitative data to foreground communicative literacies within engineering design teams at the pre-college level. A disciplinary literacies framework was used to interpret and analyze published works in this particular domain. A search, selection, and inclusion process typical for state-of-the-art reviews yielded 33 studies. Constant comparison and open-coding led to clustering studies under five overarching themes in ranked order of frequency of occurrence pertaining to: (a) engineering disciplinary communicative literacies in practice; (b) matters of access with populations underrepresented in engineering; (c) learning STEM content through engineering design; (d) affective responses to uncertainty and risk in engineering design; and (e) evaluating the quality of collaboration. With respect to the themes, we discuss possibilities of using literacy frameworks to deepen theoretical and methodological insights into the study of phenomena related to within-group communicative literacies in K-12 engineering spaces.

Shared Leadership and Team Effectiveness: An Investigation of Whether and When in Engineering Design Teams.

Shared leadership is lauded to be a performance-enhancing approach with applications in many management domains. It is conceptualized as a dynamic team process as it evolves over time. However, it is surprising to find that there are no studies that have examined its temporally relevant boundary conditions for the effectiveness of the team. Contributing to an advanced understanding of the mechanism of shared leadership in engineering design teams, this research aims to investigate whether shared leadership is positively related to team effectiveness and when shared leadership is more likely to be effective. Using a field sample of 119 individuals in 26 engineering design teams from China and the technique of social network analysis, we found that, consistent with cognate studies, shared leadership is positively related to team effectiveness when measured in terms of team task performance and team viability. Moreover, by integrating the project life cycle as a moderator, this study is among the first to investigate the temporal factors, for the effectiveness of shared leadership. The result shows that the stage of the project life cycle moderates the positive shared leadership-team effectiveness relationship, such that this association is stronger at the early phase than at the later phase of the project. Overall, these findings offer insightful thoughts to scholars in the field of shared leadership and bring practical suggestions for project managers in business who seek to implement best practice in organizations toward high team effectiveness.

Value-Based Development Connecting Engineering and Business: A Case on Electric Space Propulsion

The static relation between business and engineering design hinders the pace of innovation. While program managers often evaluate innovation in terms of financial value generated over a number of business scenarios, engineering design teams base their activities on improving product functionality and meeting technical requirements. This results in an insufficient common understanding during gate meetings about the business implications of alternative technological tradeoffs, thus negatively impacting the pace of innovation. This article presents the results from the introduction of a methodology–based on value and functional modeling–into the practice of design teams working with next-generation electric propulsion systems for satellite applications. The introduction of the methodology was evaluated via interviews, workshops, and observations with nine industrial partners. The results indicate business stakeholders and technology-focused design teams’ bidirectional interest in the methodology. In particular, the results highlight the benefits of the methodology in creating cross-boundary representations that can be used by stakeholders to share knowledge and find common ground in gate meetings. The dynamic interaction with such representations enables a faster decision-making pace during the management of innovation initiatives.

Prognostic systems representation in a function-based Bayesian model during engineering design

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) systems are usually only considered and set up in the late stage of design or even during the system’s lifetime, after the major design decision have been made. However, considering the PHM system’s impact on the system failure probabilities can benefit the system design early on and subsequently reduce costs. The identification of failure paths in the early phases of engineering design can guide the designer toward a safer, more reliable and cost-efficient design. Several functional failure modeling methods have been developed recently. One of their advantages is to allow for risk assessment in the early stages of the design. Risk and reliability functional failure analysis methods currently developed do not explicitly model the PHM equipment used to identify and prevent potential system failures. This paper proposes a framework to optimize prognostic systems selection and positioning during the early stages of a complex system design. A Bayesian network, incorporating the PHM systems, is used to analyze the functional model and failure propagation. The algorithm developed within the proposed framework returns the optimized placement of PHM hardware in the complex system, allowing the designer to evaluate the need for system improvement. A design tool was developed to automatically apply the proposed method. A generic pressurized water nuclear reactor primary coolant loop system is used to present a case study illustrating the proposed framework. The results obtained for this particular case study demonstrate the promise of the method introduced in this paper. The case study notably exhibits how the proposed framework can be used to support engineering design teams in making better informed decisions early in the design phase.

A novel systematic method to evaluate computer-supported collaborative design technologies

Selection of suitable computer-supported collaborative design (CSCD) technologies is crucial to facilitate successful projects. This paper presents the first systematic method for engineering design teams to evaluate and select the most suitable CSCD technologies comparing technology functionality and project requirements established in peer-reviewed literature. The paper first presents 220 factors that influence successful CSCD. These factors were then systematically mapped and categorised to create CSCD requirement statements. The novel evaluation and selection method incorporates these requirement statements within a matrix and develops a discourse analysis text processing algorithm with data from collaborative projects to automate the population of how technologies impact the success of CSCD in engineering design teams. This method was validated using data collected across 3 years of a student global design project. The impact of this method is the potential to change the way engineering design teams consider the technology they use and how the selection of appropriate tools impacts the success of their CSCD projects. The development of the CSCD evaluation matrix is the first of its kind enabling a systematic and justifiable comparison and technology selection, with the aim of best supporting the engineering designers collaborative design activity.

The implementation and role of geotechnical data in BIM process

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is becoming increasingly important tool in civil engineering both in the infrastructure design and construction process. BIM uses an intelligent model that provides a faster, more economical and less environmental impact for building and managing construction and infrastructure projects. Intelligent information model enable rich visualization, simulation and collaboration, which together allow better decision making throughout the project team. Major infrastructure projects that have a significant geotechnical and structural aspects may implement BIM tools and processes but often seem to neglect the geotechnical aspect of the model. This omission can lead to costly mistakes especially when the project is infrastructure-based. This paper reviews the current BIM implementations on major infrastructure projects and overseas and reviews how the inclusion of the geotechnical data in the BIM model can improve the models usefulness and the decision making process. The paper also investigates the reasons why the geotechnical data is not included and how these barriers can be removed so that the geotechnical and structural teams a fully integrated. The paper ends with a set of recommendations that, if adopted, could allow the engineering design team to produce innovative geotechnical systems and improve the cost effectiveness of construction.

A four-step model for diagnosing knowledge transfer challenges from operations into engineering design

Knowledge gained from operations can help optimize the design of new installations in terms of system performance, health, and safety. Transferring such knowledge to engineering design teams makes it available for use in projects. However, the transfer involves different challenges. To better understand and identify these challenges, we combine a knowledge transfer model with a work systems model into the development of a conceptual four-step model for knowledge transfer from operations to engineering design. Knowledge transfer implies that the knowledge must be captured, transformed into an engineering design context, transferred to the appropriate individuals, and finally, applied to the design of new facilities. In this paper, we 1) present the development of this model, 2) illustrate its application in an empirical case study in an offshore oil company, and 3) propose a generic diagnostic tool to be applied in companies to diagnose and identify the existing challenges within knowledge transfer from operations to engineering design. Relevance to industryThe proposed diagnostic tool allows for better understanding of design problems to be faced and for developing design solutions that improve health, safety, and production effectiveness. This benefits knowledge management and engineering design professionals in industries with geographically dispersed organizations.

DESIGN PROBLEM PERCEPTION IN ENGINEERING DESIGN TEAMS

Abstract – Engineering design is a decision making process that needs a good perception of the design problem to be solved. Design problems are usually solved in a team. Teams need the existence of a good design problem perception to create design solutions. This study provides an approach for elaborating a descriptive model to describe how the perception process works within a design team. This study is going to propose an approach for integrating a theoretical model of design creativity with team mental models, so they can be used for elaborating the descriptive model of perception in design teams. The NSERC Chair in Aerospace Design Engineering (NCADE) at Concordia University holds a capstone project which will be considered to be used as a test bed for validating proposed model through experimental analysis. Proposed experiments and further research are introduced at the end of paper.

Digital Engineering Design Team Journals: Providing Multimodal Opportunities for English Learners to Explain Design Choices

AbstractThis department column explores digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts and disciplines within and outside of school. Digital enhancements will encourage readers to post questions, comments, and connections.

Queries

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Shared leadership and team creativity: A social network analysis in engineering design teams

This research explores the relationship between shared leadership and creativity in engineering design teams. To do this, a social network perspective was adopted using four measures to assess key elements of shared leadership networks. These are (a) network density, (b) centraliza- tion, (c) efficiency and (d) strength. Data was collected from a sample of 22 engineering design teams who adopt a shared leadership approach. Our results support previous findings that the density of a shared leadership network is positively related to team creativity. In contrast, we learned that centralization exerts a negative influence on it. Moreover, while we found that there is no evidence to support a positive correlation between efficiency and team creativity, we demonstrate an inverted U-shaped relationship between strength and team creativity in a shared leadership network. These findings are important because they add to the academic debate in the shared leadership area and provide valuable insights for managers. th 2016 / Approved: Approved: June 7 th 2016