The issue of environmental sustainability, which is unprecedented in both magnitude and complexity, presents one of the biggest challenges faced by modern society. Engineers, including mechanical engineers, can make significant contribution to the development of solutions to this problem by designing products and processes that are more environmentally sustainable. It is critical that engineers take a paradigm shift of product design i.e. from cost and performance centered to balance of economic, environmental, and societal consideration. Although there have been quite a few design for environment (DfE, or ecodesign) tools developed, so far these tools have only achieved limited industrial penetration: they are either too qualitative/subjective to be used by designers with limited experiences, or too quantitative, costly and time consuming and thus cannot be used during the design process specially during the early design stage. This paper develops a novel, semi-quantitative ecodesign tool that targets specially on early design process. The new tool is a combination of environmental life cycle assessment, working knowledge model, and visual tools such as QFD, functional-component matrix, and Pugh chart. Redesign of staplers is selected as a case study to demonstrate the use of the proposed tool. Efforts are on going to confirm that the new design generated using this new tool does have improved environmental performance.
Reducing the environmental effects of products has become a significant focus of corporate strategies. As a result, easy-to-use
Understanding the limits of a design is an important
Evaluating Wikis as a Communicative Medium for Collaboration Within Colocated and Distributed Engineering Design TeamsWikis, freely editable collections of web pages, exhibit potential for a flexible documentation and communication tool for collaborative design tasks as well as support for team design thinking early in the design process. The purpose of this work is to analyze dimensions of wiki technologies from a communication perspective as applicable to design. A wiki was introduced in a globally distributed product development course, and the experiences and performance of colocated and distributed teams in the course were assessed through observations, surveys, and site usage analytics. With a focus on communication in design, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of using wikis in student engineering design teams. Our goal is to use wiki technologies to enhance support for design processes while exploiting the potential for increasing shared understanding among teams. Distributed teams used the wiki more as a design tool and were more supportive of its use in the course whereas colocated teams used it for documentation. The usage patterns, the number and type of files uploaded, and the wiki structure provided indicators of better performing teams. The findings also suggest ways to improve and inform students about best practices using the wiki for design and to transform the wiki as a support tool for communication during early design collaboration.
Cyber Physical Systems couple computational and physical elements, therefore the behavior of geometry (deformations, kinematics), physics and controls needs to be certified using many different tools over a very high dimensional space. Because of the near infinite number of ways such a system can fail meeting its requirements, we developed a Probabilistic Certificate of Correctness (PCC) metric which quantifies the probability of satisfying requirements with consistent statistical confidence. PCC can be implemented as a scalable engineering practice for certifying complex system behavior at every milestone in the product lifecycle. This is achieved by: creating virtual prototypes at different levels of model abstraction and fidelity; capturing and integrating these models into a simulation process flow; verifying requirements in parallel by deploying virtual prototypes across large organizations; reducing certification time proportional to additional computational resources and trading off sizing, modeling accuracy, technology and manufacturing tolerances against requirements and cost. This process is an improvement over the V-cycle because verification and validation happens at every stage of the system engineering process thus reducing rework in the more expensive implementation and physical certification phase. The PCC process is illustrated using the example of “Safe Range” certification for an UAV with active flutter control.
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