Industrial Design Practice Research Articles

Special issue on formal methods for globally asynchronous and locally synchronous (GALS) systems

This special issue is based on innovative ideas presented and discussed during the first International Workshop on Formal Methods for Globally Asynchronous and Locally Synchronous Systems (FMGALS) held in conjunction with the Formal Methods in Europe (FME) conference in Pisa, Italy, in the fall of 2003. This one-day workshop was initiated to bring together researchers in the area of formal methods, system design languages, asynchronous hardware design, and GALS design. The event was held in co-operation with ACM SIGDA and ACM SIGARCH. Since this first incarnation, another FMGALS workshop was held in Verona, Italy in 2005. A special issue for that event is already planned. One great outcome of the first workshop is that an FMGALS community has been established through a moderated mailing list. Information and research result exchanges are taking place among the various research communities who are engaged in research aimed at providing theoretical foundations of GALS design, industrial GALS design practices, and de-synchronization theory proposed by the Synchronous Programming community. Selected papers from the 2003 workshop were invited for this special issue together with an open call for papers soliciting novel contributions on the topics of this conference. Rigorous reviews of 12 submissions led to the selection of five papers. In this editorial statement, we outline the premise and the context of this special issue, and briefly introduce the papers selected.

MODEL OF CASE-BASED INDUSTRIAL DESIGN SCENARIO AND ITS APPLICATION

Based on the theories of case-based reasoning(CBR) and cognitive psychology,the concept of design scenario in- cluding problem scenario,solving scenario and solution sce- nario is proposed to depict industrial design in a cognitive ap- proach and a model of case-based industrial design scenario is built and represented as two main parts:industrial design sce- nario organization structure and scenario reasoning model. Based on the model,industrial design knowledge from the three aspects of the model is represented and a case-based computer aided design system is built up-CBID which has been put into industrial design practices.

Cultural diversity as a strategic source for designing pleasurable and competitive products, within the globalisation context

Based on a case study carried out in the household appliances industrial field, this paper discusses the practice of industrial design within the context of the globalisation process, facing the question of cultural diversity. This study emphasises the cultural diversity as a strategic source for designing pleasurable and competitive products; and the importance of designing products for society within a perspective of social and cultural responsibility and commitment, so as to enable it to promote emancipation, sustainable development, improvement of quality of life as well as the preservation of legacies and cultural identities of individuals and social groups.

Rapid prototyping and industrial design practice: can haptic feedback modelling provide the missing tactile link?

PurposeTo investigate the potential to employ tactile form‐shaping as a prerequisite to the production of physical industrial design models by rapid prototyping.Design/methodology/approachUsing a haptic feedback device to allow the designer to “feel” 3D virtual geometry as part of the evaluation and sculpting process. To maintain a close association with professional practice, this was undertaken as part of a product design case study in which a haptic feedback/rapid prototyping strategy was compared and contrasted with the more traditional workshop‐based shaping of Styrofoam by hand.FindingsThe use of a haptic feedback device facilitated the production of rapid prototype components that had been defined through feel and sculpting, albeit prior to the build process. Despite shortcomings in the ability to replicate activities undertaken in a workshop environment, other creative opportunities emerged that could not have effectively been produced using any other methods.Research limitations/implicationsWhilst based on generic industrial design methods, the findings are drawn from only one case study.Practical implicationsA useful evaluation for those wishing to undertake further research into haptic feedback modelling or employ such a system during professional practice.Originality/valueThe study moves forward the debate into the merits and application of virtual and physical modelling techniques and provides useful case study evidence of direct comparison.

An evaluation of haptic feedback modelling during industrial design practice

Whilst new technologies in designing and rapid prototyping offer demonstrable benefits, their use can remove the potential for the designer to actively engage in the definition of form through tactile interaction with a physical material (as when working with foam or clay). This paper investigates the use of a haptic feedback device to facilitate interaction with virtual geometry and provide the designer with tactile cues during product modelling. The study concludes that limitations in the modelling capabilities of commercial haptic feedback technology restrict its ability to make a significant contribution to industrial design practice.

안전한 제품을 설계하기 위한 새로운 제품위험분석 방법

Today we are observing a lot of injuries. casualties. and property losses that are mainly caused by the defects of products. In order to derive safety designs. which minimize the possibility of such product liability-related accidents. we need to take intoaccount the user-product interaction as an important part of the danger factor analysis. Existing risk analysis techniques. however. have some limitations in detecting comprehensive danger factors that are peculiarly involved in human errors and the functional defects of products. Researches on danger factor analysis regarding the user-product interaction have been carried out actively in ergonomics.br/ In this paper. we suggest a novel product risk analysis technique. which is more objective and systematic compared to the previous ones. by combining a modified TAFEl (Task Analysis For Error Identification) technique with SASA (Systematic Approach to Accident Scenario Analysis) technique. By applying this technique to the product design practice in industry. corporations will be able to improve the product safety. consequently strengthening the competitiveness.br/

Industrial best practices of conceptual process design

The chemical process industry aims particularly at energy, capital expenditure and variable feedstock cost savings due to fierce global competition, the Kyoto Protocol and requirements for sustainable development. Increasingly conceptual process design methods are used in the industry to achieve these aims. They are used in: • existing processes to renew parts; • process re-designs based on existing feedstocks and catalysts; • innovative processes (new feed stocks, new catalysts, new process routes, new multifunctional equipment). This article is focused on the best industrial conceptual design practices applied for these application areas. To this end we have reviewed methods, which are used in the chemical process industry in the last 15 years. Capital, energy and variable cost savings are indicated for each method. Specific attention is paid to: • functional integration to multi-functional equipment; • heuristic based selection of unit operations and recycle structure; • superstructure based design optimisation with mixed-integer-non-linear programming (MINLP).

A study of current logic design practices in the automotive manufacturing industry

This paper presents the results of an observational study of industrial logic designers at Lamb Technion. The purpose of this study was to determine the current methods of logic design used in industry. These observations can be used to evaluate recent academic proposals of methods for generating controllers for machines, as well as suggesting new methods. By observing the logic designers it was determined that designing logic for machining systems is substantially different than writing computer code, both in the specification and in the people who will design and use the system. In addition, recent academic developments in Discrete Event Systems are difficult to apply to the problems of industrial logic control. Even methods which researchers design specifically for industrial logic design are difficult to apply, both due to the lack of support for the methods, and the unsuitability of the methods to solve problems in this domain. The primary observations of this study are the following. • The observed Logic designers need to at least: determine acceptable machine behavior, foresee potential error conditions, predict user behavior, and design the logic needed for a machine. This is a greater range of responsibilities than expected. • Logic for one machine is generally copied directly from a previous project. However, copying logic generally involves manually retyping everything due to incompatibilities in the development environments. • Customers continue to ask for more features, and it is unlikely that this trend will stop. Some of these features are extremely difficult to implement using existing methods. Such features include: detailed part tracking, more sophisticated user interfaces, and greater diagnostic ability.

Towards User - Centred Design: A Method Development Project in a Product Design Consultancy

A user-centred design (UCD) approach aims to design products suitable for their intended users by involving them in the design. This article describes an action research and development project where user-centred design techniques from the human-computer interaction field were applied to the work practice of ED-Design Ltd, Scandinavia's largest industrial design consultancy. The paper contributes to discussion on the practice of industrial design in companies today. It describes the goals, process and results of the project, and discusses the lessons learned. In the literature, the use and adaptation of methods is typically smooth and successful. How is it in real life? What happens when an industrial designer is asked to test his or her own designs with users?

MADEsmart: An Environment for Improved Development of Aircraft Components in Preliminary Design

The MADEsmart Project represents a unique contribution to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Rapid Design Exploration and Optimization (RaDEO) Program and to U.S. industrial aircraft design practice. The project team’s work focused heavily on the introduction of design and manufacturing constraint information early in the product development lifecycle. Since conventional aircraft development efforts are highly inefficient for identifying and managing product requirements and design constraints, a development team’s ability to effectively evaluate proposed design solutions can be negatively impacted. This project’s work employed three main technologies to accomplish its vision of greatly improving the design of aircraft components: (1) intelligent agent technology to streamline coordination between development team resources; (2) Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) technology to allow for rapid design exploration and optimization; and (3) the introduction of design evaluation for manufacturing process constraints at the preliminary stage of design using a natural language processing rep-resentation known as Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCS). This paper provides motivation for the MADEsmart project’s research, an overview of each of its three main focus areas, a more detailed description of each of the technology applications, and some concluding remarks.

Interactive generative systems for conceptual design: An empirical perspective

This paper argues from extensive research findings in design psychology and industrial design processes, as well as our own observations, that interactive generative systems can be powerful tools for human designers. Moreover, interactive generative systems can fit naturally into human design thinking and industrial design practice. This discussion is focused on aesthetic design fields like knitwear and graphic design, but is largely applicable to major branches of engineering. Human designers and generative systems have complementary abilities. Humans are extremely good at perceptual evaluation of designs, according to criteria that are extremely hard to program. As a result, they can provide fitness evaluations for evolutionary generative systems. They can also tailor the biases that generation systems use to reach useful solutions quickly. We discuss an application of these approaches: Kelly's evolutionary systems for color scheme design. Automatic design systems can work interactively with human designers by generating complete designs from partial specifications, that can then be used as starting points for designing by modification. We discuss an application of this approach: Eckert's garment shape design system.

Multicomponent condensation in a shell and tube condenser – A comprehensive dataset

The purpose of this paper is to provide a database suitable for the validation of computer codes for condenser design purposes. It is too extensive to publish in full but copies of all data tables are available direct from the author. The test condenser is of industrial scale, (0.483 m diameter and 2.438 m between tubeplates), and design, (TEMA E), and should therefore be of particular relevance for this purpose. The important condition that all the individual resistances to heat and mass transfer should be controlling in some part of the dataset is fulfilled, by covering condensation of steam and steam–air mixtures, methanol and isopropanol and their mixtures with water, and hydrocarbon mixtures, commercial hexane and methylcyclohexane-toluene. Care is taken to ensure that the condenser is operating in a loaded condition with an appreciable vent flow to a knockout condenser. Data are reported at atmospheric pressure and at reduced pressures down to approximately 0.1 bar. Further the work includes measurements of the pressure and temperature profiles not only in condensation but with single-phase flow of air and two-phase flow of air–water mixtures in the stratified and spray flow regimes. The data have been analysed by standard methods available in the literature and specific conclusions are reached with respect to the performance of these methods. A particular feature is the application of rigorous models to predict multicomponent mass transfer. Care has been taken to describe the measurement techniques, their reliability and that of the dataset itself in consequence. The conclusions of the work are related to current industrial design practice and some needs for modification of current design methods are noted.

"Better Than Silver and Gold": Design Schools for Women in America, 1848-1860

During the mid-nineteenth century, schools of design for women in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York formed the core of a mid-nineteenth-century movement to educate women in the theory and practice of industrial design. A diverse cross section of educated Americans—women's rights advocates, intellectuals, merchants, and philanthropists—supported an effort promising to elevate the status of women and to benefit the growth of American industrial arts. Design schools trained hundreds of future artists and teachers in artistic professions, while providing such female intellectuals as Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Ednah Dow (Littlehale) Cheney the opportunity to discuss women's issues in a public forum. From written records describing the great hope invested in female education and the professional status that became a possibility for women at midcentury, historians can begin to reassess the position of nineteenth-century women involved in the arts.

A Parametric Approach to Machinery Unitization in Shipbuilding

During the past ten years, both U.S. and foreign shipyards have developed advanced unitization concepts that include multi-level assemblies representing large vertical segments of ship machinery spaces. This paper describes a parametrically derived family of large, fully integrated standard machinery units that are applicable over a range of ship types and installed horsepower. The results include a hierarchy of standard units, the selection of standard unit sizes and interfaces, the development of parametric standards for system design, engine room arrangement and structural design, and machinery unit structural and outfitting design. Benchmarking is reported with respect to Japanese and European shipbuilding practices, and with respect to U.S. land based industrial plant design and construction practices. The proposed unitization concept is demonstrated in a ship-specific engine room arrangement design effort. A business assessment for this unitization concept is presented which addresses its potential shipbuilding cost and schedule impacts as evaluated by three U.S. shipyards.

Cost-effective parallel processing for H /H∞ controller synthesis

A distributed version of a homotopy algorithm for solving the H /H∞ mixed-norm controller synthesis problem is presented. The main purpose of the study is to explore the possibility of achieving high performance with low cost. Existing UNIX workstations running PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) are utilized. Only the jacobian matrix computation is distributed and therefore the modification to the original sequential code is minimal. The same algorithm has also been implemented on an Intel Paragon parallel machine. Our implementation shows that acceptable speed-up is achieved and the larger the problem sizes, the higher the speed-up. Compared with the results from the Intel Paragon, the study concludes that utilizing the existing UNIX workstations can be a very cost-effective approach to shorten computation time. Furthermore, this economical way to achieve high performance computation can easily be realized and incorporated in a practical industrial design environment.

Computation of quasi-static electric fields with region-oriented charge simulation

The calculation of quasi-static electric fields on and near perfectly conducting and lossy components is an important part of HV insulation design. Problems associated with the estimation of power losses in EHV insulating systems composed of lossy dielectrics often arise in industrial design practice. Moreover, thin conducting layers can significantly change the potential distribution along the HV insulation. An application of region-oriented charge simulation to the computation of quasi-static electric fields for systems with perfectly conducting and lossy components is presented. In contrast to other integral methods this formulation does not require any special treatment of thin conducting layers. This method shows good agreement between numerical and analytical calculations for both 2D and 3D formulations, and has been effectively applied to practical problems.

Designing for pressure drop in Venturi scrubbers: the importance of dry pressure drop

An industrial scale Venturi scrubber pilot plant has been used to provide detailed measurements of pressure drop as a function of a broad range of operating conditions. Modelling approaches suitable for design predictions of Δ P have been examined. While numerical models provide clearer understanding of the phenomena occurring in scrubbers, analytical models offer the most promise of improving industrial design practice. These models concentrate on the work done on the liquid phase and ignore turbulence-induced gas phase accelerational (dry pressure drop) losses. However, the experiments show that the latter are important even in well-designed, classical Venturi shapes. Available models are compared, for the first time, with actual wet pressure drop data and agreement is shown to be good. By isolating the dry pressure drop effect, design models can be applied to a wider range of Venturi geometries.

Coriolis flowmeters: industrial practice and published information

This paper attempts to bring together the latest published and commercially available work on the Coriolis flowmeter. The paper describes the background to the meter, gives a qualitative description of operation together with the simple theory, indicates recent developments in the literature, outlines industrial design variations and practice including sizes, ranges and installation precision, and finally considers applications, advantages and disadvantages.

Boilers, evaporators, and condensers

Basic Design Methods of Heat Exchangers (S. Kakac & E. Paykoc). Forced Convection Correlations for Single-Phase Side of Heat Exchangers (S. Kakac & R. Oskay). Heat Exchanger Fouling (A. Agrawal & S. Kakac). Industrial Heat Exchanger Design Practices (J. Taborek). Fossil-Fuel-Fired Boilers: Fundamentals and Elements (J. Kitto & M. Albrecht). Once-Through Boilers (R. Leithner). Thermohydraulic Design of Fossil-Fuel-Fired Boiler Components (Z. Lin). Nuclear Steam Generators and Waste Heat Boilers (J. Collier). Heat Transfer in Condensation (P. Marto). Steam Power Plant and Process Condensers (D. Butterworth). Evaporators and Condensers for Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Systems (M. Pate). Evaporators and Reboilers in the Process and Chemical Industries (P. Whalley). Appendix. Tables. Index.

Chernobyl: the inevitable results of secrecy

The Chernobyl accident was the inevitable outcome of a combination of bad design, bad management and bad communication practices in the Soviet nuclear industry. We review the causes of the accident, its impact on Soviet society, and its effects on the health of the population in the surrounding areas. It appears that the secrecy that was endemic in the USSR has had profound negative effects on both technological safety and public health.