Early design evaluation of products artifacts’: An approach based on dimensional analysis for combined analysis of environmental, technical and cost requirements

Abstract

The early development process of products imposes to fulfill numerous types of requirements simultaneously. Those requirements are often qualitative and imprecise. The main tasks of a development team consist of grasping and understanding customer needs, refining these needs, synthesizing concepts of solutions, evaluating and selecting appropriate solutions. Evaluating and selecting solutions is a critical stage because various types of metrics are used to measure performances of concepts. This paper presents both theoretical contributions and practical implementations. This article presents a theoretical analysis of resource consumption and environmental impact from the viewpoint of exergy. In addition, this article provides a theoretical answer to the issue of qualitative modeling of early design concepts of solutions. This article opens a fruitful perspective for combining heterogeneous requirements in a coherent and systematic manner by using dimensional analysis calculus.

Dimensional Methods Used in the Additive Manufacturing Process

“…The most appropriate dimensional approach for efficiently establishing a set of dimensionless variables, bearing in mind Szirtes' theory [149,150], is the dimensional analysis conceptual modeling (DACM) framework developed by Coatanéa [156][157][158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166][167]. The DACM provides the following main results.…”

“…In his Ph.D. thesis [157,159], Coatanéa proposed a new approach, which he called conceptual modeling of life-cycle design, subsequently perfecting and renaming it the conceptual modeling and simulation framework for system design [158][159][160][161][162]. Currently, modeling and simulation are widely applied to achieve a more efficient final product using AM.…”

“…We only tested the efficiency of MDA for specimen optimization. However, this approach, using the dimensional analysis conceptual modeling (DACM) framework developed by Coatanéa [157][158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166][167], can also be extended and successfully implemented in different areas of additive manufacturing.…”

Proposal for an Architectural Solution for Economic and Environmental Global Eco-Cost Assessment: Model Combination Analysis

“…Some research proposals have started working on unified metric units. For instance, decibels have been proposed as a possibility (Coatanea et al 2007). This solution has no unity dependence and indicates the contribution or losses of the value (the decibel is calculated as a ratio compared to a nominal value) (Seager and Theis 2004).…”

Eco Global Evaluation: Cross Benefits of Economic and Ecological Evaluation

“…The energy equivalent calculation is another possibility. This thermodynamic concept suites to measuring material and energy resource consumption for each impact [14][15] [16].…”