Engineering Design Innovation Research Articles

Improving undergraduate graduation chemical design using green techniques based on green engineering principles

Green engineering education is of great significance. The development of the chemical industry has a new direction under the background of engineering back to green engineering and chemistry. The undergraduate graduation chemical design is an important course for the comprehensive application of professional knowledge and bridging to the actual production, and also important support for the cultivation of chemical talent. This paper presents a case in which the improvement of ethyl acrylate process design can be selected as a topic of undergraduate graduation chemical design, which has both an industrial production process foundation that student can learn and engineering design innovation under the guidance of the green engineering concept. After the design study, the results show that the process design of ethyl acrylate supported by new clean catalysis and membrane separation technologies has been improved in reducing process complexity and improving environmental friendliness. Furthermore, the teaching result indicates that the process design reinforces students' green engineering thinking and provides a green engineering teaching format for chemical design.

Survey of technologies of line commutated converter based high voltage direct current transmission in China

This paper reviews the applications of line commutated converter based high voltage direct current transmission (LCC-HVDC) technologies in China, with a special focus on UHVDC technology developed in the last 10 years. The paper examines six specific aspects of areas-voltage increase, capacity upgrade, reliability improvement, engineering design innovation, equipment and materials innovation, and the R&D of next step. Subsequent advances in LCC-HVDC technologies in recent years are also discussed.

The Effect of Challenge-Hindrance Stressor on Engineering Design Innovation Behavior — The Mediating Role of Intrinsic Motivation

This paper explores the differential effects of work stressors on employee innovation behavior, the mediating role of intrinsic motivation by data collected from 282 engineering design staff under the situations of high strength construction project tasks and heavy stress through questionnaires. Empirical study results show that the challenge stressor has significant positive prediction function on individual innovation behavior, hindrance stressor has significant negative influence on individual innovation behavior; intrinsic motivation has partial mediating role between two types of stressors and individual innovation behavior.

The Obscure Features Hypothesis in design innovation

A new cognitive theory of innovation, the Obscure Features Hypothesis (OFH), is applied to the area of engineering design innovation. The OFH states that all innovative solutions are built upon at least one overlooked (i.e., obscure) feature of the problem at hand. In this paper, we first highlight the types of features that exist and the cognitive obstacles that hinder people's ability to notice the obscure members of various feature types. We then detail five innovation techniques we have developed to help designers search the obscure realms of the space of features. Each of these techniques counteracts a specific cognitive obstacle to innovation: design fixation, functional fixedness, narrow verb associations, assumption blindness, and analogy blindness. We compare our approach with other approaches to innovation in psychology (the representation change view and the distant association view) and engineering (theory of inventive problem solving and C–K theory). Finally, we show how the innovation techniques can be implemented in software to assist users in the design process.

Semantic methods supporting engineering design innovation

In this paper, we present a metric based on semantic relatedness which operates on semantic knowledge representations of engineering design and show how it can support design innovation. Our semantic knowledge representation is composed of an ontology representing design concepts using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) functional basis formalism. We assert that the uniqueness of a design concept is directly proportional to the mean semantic distance between itself and the set of competing design concepts represented as instances within our functional basis ontology. This leads to our Semantic Relatedness Uniqueness Metric called SeRUM. SeRUM draws upon semantic functional model representations of design concepts and computer science semantic relatedness techniques. SeRUM provides design teams a measure of their effectiveness in terms of generating unique design concepts. To highlight SeRUM’s application in engineering design innovation, a design innovation case study is detailed and the results are discussed.

The Piston-Stayed Bridge: A Novel Typology for a Mobile Bridge at Tervate, Belgium

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKey words:: typologypistonstaymobilemulti-functional

Photogrammetric Reverse Engineering of the “Angel of the North”

The Department of Geomatics and the Regional Centre for Innovation in Engineering Design in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne collaborated in a project to produce precise measurements for use in the fabrication of the body of the “Angel of the North” sculpture. This 20 m high edifice, by the sculptor Antony Gormley, is located adjacent to the A1(M) in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.This paper reviews the photogrammetric reverse engineering work carried out on a 1:10 scale plaster maquette of the “Angel of the North”, which is a life‐size model of the sculptor's body without any arms. The three dimensional measurements of the maquette, made by analytical photogrammetric techniques, were then processed to produce a fully functional three dimensional CAD model from which the dimensions needed by the fabricating company, Hartlepool Steel Fabrications Ltd., could be extracted. Additionally, the VirtuoZo digital photogrammetric software package was used to investigate the potential of automated measurement for this type of work and the results were compared with those obtained analytically.