This paper presents an energy based approach to functional decomposition that is applicable to the top down design (system to subsystems to components) of mechanical systems. The paper shows that the main functions of convert and transmit are sufficient to focus on the “functional flow” or main energy flow resulting in the specific action sought as a result of the artifact being designed, and can be expanded upon at the lowest level when looking for specific solutions based upon the energy and mass balances and the knowledge within the design team. This approach considers function as a transformation and also fits the approach presented in TRIZ. The standard energy, material, and signal flows are seen as forms of energy flows, and it is only their transformation and transmission that is sought. This simplified approach, coupled with an aspect of control and interaction between a reference state and the artifact or between various components is sufficient to comprehensively describe the system that matches very nicely the value function approach of Miles. Furthermore, as these interactions can be considered as artifact-artifact affordances when considering the artifact for either artifact interaction or within an environment, its relation to the user and to the reference state can be addressed during the design phase, in addition to the functions.
Seeking for an appropriate design of wind farm (WF) layout constitutes a complex task in a wind energy project. An optimization approach is seriously needed to deal with this complexity, especially with current trend of large WFs area with important number of wind turbines (WTs). The present paper investigates optimization study of realistic offshore WF design layout (horns-rev1). The main objective of the current study is to design WF area that maximizes the extraction of wind power with low cost. In the first step, an optimization model using genetic algorithm with continuous layout representation is developed to look for the optimal design as a function of WTs placement. The effectiveness of such a methodology is validated and compared with the reference and irregular layout of hors-rev1 offshore WF. With the aim to analyze the impact of WTs types on WF objectives, four commercial WTs are considered in the second step. The results showed that designing WF with big WTs gives best design layout. In addition, it demonstrated that selecting WTs based uniquely on rotor diameter size is not always a good idea. It should includes as well the number of WTs that influence significantly the power production and WF cost.Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
The TRIZ theory has demonstrated its effectiveness in solving creative problems in the product design field. However, its exploitation and the application of its various tools and techniques remain difficult for the nonexperts. Generally, the theory does not offer the necessary tools in the preprocessing phases, to support problem modeling. In this context the aim of many research studies is to make easier the TRIZ tools exploitation. The work developed in this paper deals with the TRIZ contradiction matrix exploitation difficulty, and focuses on technical contradictions established for a complex system prioritizing. The technical contradictions prioritizing will be achieved through induced effects impact evaluation on the different specified design objectives. The proposed approach allows analyzing and structuring the design problem in order to exploit the TRIZ contradiction matrix for the design problem resolving. The proposed approach responds to the main problems raised during TRIZ matrix exploitation, especially problems related to the abstraction process ie the standard contradiction formulation and their hierarchy. This aim is achieved through the decision-maker preferences (DMP) integration. An illustration of the proposed approach is carried out with a case study on the wind system.
In recent decades, the major preoccupation of industrialists has shifted towards the production of ecological products, given the actual environmental issues on the environment. to overcome this problem, several methodologies have been proposed, notably regarding the valorization of End-of-Life (EoL) products. The study of relevant literature indicates that in order to successfully recover EoL products, a design for an easily disassembled product should be considered from the early design stages. Therefore, the objective of the work reported in this paper is to support designers firstly to evaluate the disassembly from the beginning of the design process notably during the conceptual design, based on the following four criteria: type of disassembly tools, accessibility and operator's posture during disassembly, disassembly time and the chosen EoL scenarios, and secondly to mark off the field of proposed concepts using the technique of reference concepts, which will help to delimite the scope of feasible alternatives and thus reject unfeasible alternatives from a disassembly point of view. An indicator was proposed to determine distance between a proposed concept and reference concepts, which represent the minimum acceptable. In order to prove the relevance of our approach, we applied it to an industrial case of three different concepts of a solar collector support. The results obtained allowed us to reduce the field of proposed solutions from three alternatives to two. Furthermore, the analysis of obtained results allowed us to extract some relevant recommendations to be made in the EoL strategy, in order to improve the disassembly performance of the rejected alternative. The evaluation results obtained after the modification of the EoL strategy allowed us to keep the alternative initially rejected after improving the criteria which had low scores compared to the reference concepts.
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