Integrated Design Solution Research Articles

PrinterCAD: a QFD and TRIZ integrated design solution for large size open moulding manufacturing

Over the last years, good strategies for efficient manufacturing were considered increasing the volume of production and reducing the time and costs. Emerging design strategies as the Design for Environment and life cycle assessment, the Design for Sustainability, the Design for Disassembly moved the focus to conceive a product by taking care of all the effect that its use can cause to the economy, to the society and to the environment, also at its disposal. In this context, design strategies have to be enhanced in order to integrate innovation with sustainability and social care. Thus, the horizon for strategic manufacturing has to pay particular attention to the effects that it could produce to the surrounding environment. This way, some manufacturing techniques that could be considered obsolete in terms of sustainability awareness, but that are not yet ready to be replaced by advanced available technologies, need a requalification in order to be collocated in the current scenario. In this paper, the open moulding technique has been discussed in order to update the current manufacturing technique to meet the emerging sustainable strategies. Through the integration of QFD and TRIZ an innovative design method have been assessed to enhance the manufacturing process by means of computer aided engineering devices. PrinterCAD is a project that aims to manage additive and subtractive techniques, applied to complex and large-scale products, by means of an open source software with an integrated module, in order to enhance the CAD, CAM and slicing for the 3D printer’s languages intercommunication.

Designing integrated local production systems: A study on the food-energy-water nexus

Centralised production of essential products and services based on fossil fuels and large scale distribution infrastructures has contributed to a plethora of issues such as deterioration of ecosystems, social-economic injustice and depletion of resources. The establishment of local production systems that deliver various products for local consumption (e.g. food, energy and water) by making the best use of locally available renewable resources can potentially alleviate unsustainable resource consumption. The main objective of this work is to develop process systems engineering tools combined with the concept of resource accounting using exergy for the design of such local production systems. A general design framework comprising an optional preliminary design stage followed by a simultaneous design stage based on mathematical optimisation is proposed. The preliminary design stage considers each supply subsystem individually and allows insights into the potential interactions between them. The simultaneous design stage yields an optimal design of the local production system and has the capacity to include all design integration possibilities between the subsystems and generate a truly integrated design solution. The proposed methodology, which reflects generalised principles for designing local production systems, has been illustrated through a case study on the integrated design of the food-energy-water nexus for a designated eco-town in UK. It demonstrates the advantages of an integrated design of a system making use of local resources to meet its demands over a system relying on centralised supplies and a design without considering integration opportunities between subsystems.

DESIGNING INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT TRANSPORT ENTERPRISES ENTROPY APPROACH

Major construction this article discusses the methodological foundations of intelligent control systems for complex technical objects in the class of hierarchical control systems based on entropy approach. The notion of design space to MIS (management systems dynamically-changing facilities), its topology and metric. The generalized criterion of the complexity of the design decisions. The approaches to the definition of entropy at the executive level, the level of coordination and planning level. The problem of the comparative assessment of the complexity of the control algorithms synthesized based on neural network technology and fuzzy logic. As part of the proposed concept design ISU to the methodological principles of design to the ISU. On the basis of estimates of the complexity of design decisions on the levels of planning, coordination and executive level. This allows a common position to ensure the required quality of design decisions by limiting the complexity of their implementation. Too complex sentence. Split into simpler evaluation of the complexity of the proposed management and algorithmic complexity control algorithms based on entropy approach, which allows on the basis of scalar criterion to evaluate the complexity of integrated design solutions. A method for estimating the complexity of interpolation algorithms based on soft computing technology that allows for a reasonable complexity of algorithms for constructing nonlinear dynamic models, nonlinear regulators.

Effects of manufacturing constraints on the cost and weight efficiency of integral and differential automotive composite structures

The introduction of carbon fibre composites into the high volume automotive sector challenges the design process, since these components not only need to be light but also producible in a cost-efficient manner. One way forward is to introduce manufacturing constraints into the design process, but such constraints affect the freedom of design and opportunities to tailor material properties. This work examines the trade-offs between cost-effective design for manufacturing and the weight optimization of composite structures. This will be achieved by introducing restrictions to the number of plies allowed in structural optimization in order to simplify pre-operations and reduce overall manufacturing investments. Both integral and differential design solutions are considered. It was observed that differential solutions were always more cost and weight efficient than the integral solution, however too severe manufacturing constraints result in an expensive final part due to the additional weight.

A Mixed-μ Approach to the Integrated Design of an FDI/FTC System Applied to a High-Fidelity Industrial Airbus Nonlinear Simulator

This paper addresses the problem of detecting and isolating faults in the angle-of-attack (AoA) measurements, when the faulty sensors outnumber the healthy ones. Such a scenario hinders the applicability of heuristic-based techniques, such as voting schemes. Rather than including additional sensors, which would increase payload and system complexity, the solution adopted herein takes advantage of the knowledge on the dynamics of the aircraft, modeled by a linear fractional transformation (LFT), to detect and isolate faults. This approach is used to minimize the impact of the faulty sensors on the control performance of the vehicle, by feeding the controller with the compensated measurement. An integrated design solution is adopted based on μ-synthesis, thus directly addressing the issue of model uncertainty. Simulation results are presented obtained from a very high-fidelity Airbus industrial simulator.

Design and Optimization of a Cyberphysical Digital-Microfluidic Biochip for the Polymerase Chain Reaction

The amount of DNA strands available in a biological sample is a major limitation for many genomic bioanalyses. To amplify the traces of DNA strands, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is widely used for conducting subsequent experiments. Compared to conventional instruments and analyzers, the execution of PCR on a digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) can achieve short time-to-results, low reagent consumption, rapid heating/cooling rates, and high integration of multiple processing modules. However, the PCR biochip design methods in the literature are oblivious to the inherent randomness and complexity of bioanalyses, and they do not consider the interference among the neighboring devices and the cost of droplet transportation. We present an integrated design solution to optimize the complete PCR procedure, including: 1) DNA amplification and termination control; 2) resource placement that satisfies proximity constraints; and 3) droplet transportation. Based on the sensor feedback data, a statistical model is developed to optimize and control the DNA amplification sequence in real-time on a cyberphysical biochip. Next, we present a geometric algorithm for avoiding device interference and for reducing droplet routing cost. A novel optical sensing system is deployed based on the physical visibility of droplets. Simulation results for three laboratory protocols demonstrate that the proposed design method results in a compact layout and produces an execution sequence for efficient control of PCR operations on a cyberphysical DMFB.

What is Design Creativity?

Background : Creativity is dealt with in the field of psychology and is the center of the design domain. To intuitively embody ideas from priori concepts based on perceptions, experiences and sensibility, design creativity is transferred as one of the solution sets to ill-structured problems in a semi-autonomous condition. Since research on creativity in design deals with one of the themes in design methodologies, an in-depth study, as a large room filled by the scientific approach, is needed. Methods : The purpose of this study is to define creativity in design and to understand the articulation and position of design creativity from circumjacent information and knowledge, cognition and experience, and intuition. Accordingly, the study characterizes design creativity in the 21st Century as the age of knowledge integration and expands the meaning. Based on various empirical studies and case studies, this study employs deductive reasoning and qualitative research methodology in order to clarify the argument. Diagrams are used to imply and complement discussion and to help the reader understand creativity in design. Results : Creative outputs from design come from various solutions, which emerge from the problem definitions of existence. In this process, creativity is the most necessary virtue. Creativity is regarded as the main theme of design methodology. Furthermore, creativity requires an integrated design solution in order to find out design problems that have occurred in different phases and multi-disciplinary areas. Thus, creativity in design is inherently essential. Since design is a science that employs intuition and intelligence and a universal art for a large number of people, design creativity is expressed as an appearance of solutions that specify some ideas based on cognition and experience. Presently, design creativity is connected and promoted in fourth generation design thinking, which demands the process of inter-professional collaboration in a transdisciplinary dimension. Conclusion : Design creativity appears through connection, migration and integration of cognition, intuition, knowledge, experience and the senses of existence. However, design creativity can also be defined as a creative solution oriented towards innovation, which is based on effectiveness and initiated by innate motivation, reflection and transference of contextual factors.

Robust Approach for Concurrent Aircraft Design and Airline Network Design

Conceptual aircraft design directly impacts the structure of an airline’s route network and ability to service demand for various ticket itineraries between origin and destination city pairs. The decisions made in allocating new aircraft to serve predicted future demand of various ticket itineraries affects an airline’s risk and profit potential. Therefore, choices on the selection of target market travel itineraries to be served and design requirements of new, yet-to-be-introduced aircraft directly govern the tradeoff of risk against potential profit. This paper presents a concurrent engineering strategy for an airline that wishes to investigate the impact that aircraft design choices and target market capture decisions have on tradeoffs between expected profit and risk in serving particular demand itineraries. The approach considers the integrated domains of aircraft design, airline operations, and passenger demand within the context of a mathematical programming problem. More specifically, innovations are leveraged in a robust modern portfolio optimization that addresses issues of uncertainties in estimated measures of risk and reward and concurrent engineering techniques from multidisciplinary design optimization to provide integrated aircraft design solutions. The framework is first illustrated with a simple eight-city network problem where a conceptual airline seeks to identify the optimal target market capture for various demand itineraries and select an aircraft that can best maximize profits at a specified tolerance of risk from a candidate list of aircraft designs. This is then extended to the more general case of designing an aircraft under the same conditions.

The Use of Three-Dimensional Integrated Design System in Smart Substation Design

The traditional power design, construction, has been able to meet the requirements, but it has not been established engineering data database support and the correlation between the data is poor, due to inadequate coordination among design professionals, design easily lead to mistakes, field problems, and design results failed in all aspects of the project to be fully utilized. With the technology of three-dimensional integrated design system penetrates in all walks of life, the introduction of three-dimensional integrated design system substation design solutions and the application of common devices of State Grid Corporation in recent years, which provide technical conditions for the application of virtual reality technology in substation design. According to its own characteristics of substation project, we now propose prospect on virtual reality technology in substation design application.

Improving energy efficiency of sawmill industrial sites by integration with pellet and CHP plants

An essential strategy to lower energy and resources consumption is the development of highly integrated industrial sites including different kind of plants complementing one another. Sawmills are huge biomass suppliers to other industries, such as pulp and paper mills, pellet plants and CHP plants, and part of the biomass is also used for the internal heat requirement. In this paper the integration of a sawmill with a pellet plant and a CHP plant is investigated using advanced process integration techniques, so that the thermal energy and the electricity produced in the CHP plant by burning part of the sawmill biomass output are used for the heat and power requirements of the other two industries. The results show that up to 18% of the biomass by-products from the sawmill can be saved, but from the economic point of view the ratio between prices of the thermal energy sold for district heating and the low quality biomass has to be lower than the present one to make the integrated design solution more attractive than separate plant operation.

Capstone Project to Satisfy EAC Criteria

Engineering Accreditation Council (EAC) has introduced eleven outcomes for engineering programs in Malaysia. Some of these outcomes are easily achievable and some are difficult to achieve through the traditional curriculum based education. This paper proposed a capstone project to provide learning experiences which may develop students ability in many of the EAC criteria. The students are grouped into 5-member teams. These groups are given a relatively sophisticated design project where the students would have to apply most of their knowledge and skills they accumulated during their learning experiences at UKM engineering program in order to carry out the design project. A two-stage cooperative learning method was adopted where in the first stage the students are grouped to develop expert panels. In this stage, each group was asked to study the problem and to find the best solution in a particular domain such as geotechnique, drainage, structure, foundation, environmental, water supply, sewerage or transportation. In the second stage, the students are regrouped such that each group would consists of experts for all the domains. The final result is that the students were able to provide an integrated design solution and they were able to explain their decisions effectively and confidently. This is the manifestation of their ability to work in a team, ability to communicate effectively, having indepth technical competence in a specific domain, ability to undertake problem identification, formulation and solution, ability to utilise a systems approach to design, ability to function effectively as an individual and in a group with the capacity to be a leader or manager as well as an effective team member, having the understanding of the social, cultural, global and environmental responsibilities and the need for sustainable development and ability to use the techniques, skills, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice. In addition, their ability to find the necessary knowledge and to apply the knowledge in their design project is preparing the students to recognise of the importance of life long learning.

Design and Application of the Multifunctional Digital Automobile Instrument

According to the developmental trend of modern automobile instrument, this paper puts forward a multifunctional digital instrument based on the embedded Linux system. The digital instrument panel consists of embedded microprocessor and contact screen, and it could not only receive and process all kinds of driving information from peripheral interface and display the results on the LCD, but also has the function of aided parking. This paper proposes an integrated design solution for the digital instrument. The design selects the TI’s TMS320DM355, which includes LCD and contact screen module, CAN bus module, LIN bus module, video-in and audio-out. The digital instrument can receive real-time data, and also process the data and store it in the RAM and display all vehicle operating parameters in the LCD and realizes real time monitoring in backing up. Based on the experiment, it is proved that the designed system reaches the primary design specifications.

Assisting designer using feature modeling for lifecycle

This paper presents a product dynamic model and design for X solution (DFX) developed in C++ with the OpenCASCADE geometric kernel, allowing the designer not only to get feedback on the viability of his design choices but also to collect data for process and task planning, maintenance and end-of-life strategy planning. The implemented method evaluates automatically both the efficiency factors and the incompatibilities between development characteristics in order to optimize the design of the product for multiple domains. The framework of this DFX solution, based on the product data structure, consists of imposing integration constraints concerning the development process during the entire design product process. In this paper, simple assemblies are used as brief examples to demonstrate the application of the proposed integrated design solution, its effectiveness to improve the design for X and collecting useful data for entire lifecycle duration. The method developed has been formalized with the NIAM model.

Application of sensitivity analysis in design of sustainable buildings

Building performance can be expressed by different indicators such as primary energy use, environmental load and/or the indoor environmental quality and a building performance simulation can provide the decision maker with a quantitative measure of the extent to which an integrated design solution satisfies the design objectives and criteria. In the design of sustainable buildings, it is beneficial to identify the most important design parameters in order to more efficiently develop alternative design solutions or reach optimized design solutions. Sensitivity analyses make it possible to identify the most important parameters in relation to building performance and to focus design and optimization of sustainable buildings on these fewer, but most important parameters. The sensitivity analyses will typically be performed at a reasonably early stage of the building design process, where it is still possible to influence the most important design parameters. A methodology of sensitivity analysis is presented and an application example is given for design of an office building in Denmark.

Versatility and Vicissitude: An Introduction to Performance in Morpho‐Ecological Design

AbstractThe dictionary explanation of ‘performance’ is to ‘carry out an action’ or ‘to fulfil a task’. Invariably, this definition seems to invoke a tired utilitarian debate on the correlation between form and function. Here, Michael Hensel and Achim Menges explain how in this issue of AD they aim to move the debate on entirely. In so doing, they redefine form not as the shape of a material object alone, but as the multitude of effects, the milieu of conditions, modulations and microclimates that emanate from the exchange of an object with its specific environment – a dynamic relationship that is both perceived and interacted with by a subject. Performance evolves from the synthesis of this dynamic, while morpho‐ecological design concerns an instrumental approach, making form and function less of a dualism and more of a synergy that aspires to integral design solutions and an alternative model for sustainability. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Neuro-Genetic Design Optimization Framework to Support the Integrated Robust Design Optimization Process in CE

This article describes an integrated and optimized product design framework to support the design optimization applications in concurrent engineering (CE). The significant consideration is given to show the effectiveness of hybrid approaches and how they can be used to improve the performance of integrated design optimization applications. The proposed approach is based on two-stages which are (1) the use of neural networks (NNs) and genetic algorithm (GA) with feature technology for integrated design activities and (2) the use of Taguchi’s method and GA for design parameters optimization. The first stage resulted in better integrated design solutions in terms of computational complexity and later resulted in a solution, which leads to better and more robust parameter values for multi-objective shape design optimization. The effectiveness and validity of the proposed approach are evaluated with examples.

Speech privacy in office spaces

Lack of speech privacy in office spaces is an issue that has been inadequately addressed for decades. Now may be the time to reconsider the consequences of not properly designing our work spaces, since ever increasing noise intrusions are having more adverse effects on knowledge worker productivity. Both lab and field tests were performed to characterize the acoustic environment in closed work spaces, and acoustic performance was determined on the basis of the speech privacy index (PI). The goal was to develop an integrated design solution for closed offices spaces based on signal-to-noise performance.

Application of the Analytical Design Planning Technique to Construction Project Management

Current construction project planning practices take little account of the interdisciplinary, iterative nature of the design process. This, combined with work packaging devised to suit construction and other influences on design planning, leads to a compromised design process containing inevitable cycles of redesign. This paper describes the Analytical Design Planning Technique (ADePT), a project planning methodology that helps to overcome these problems by providing a structured approach based on information flow rather than the production of design deliverables. It takes in account the iterative nature of design enabling coordinated, integrated design solutions to be developed within budgetary and time constraints.