Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-g5fl4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-01T23:16:22.164Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Functional Trade-offs in the Mechanical Design of Integrated Products - Impact on Robustness and Optimisability

Part of: Robust Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Nökkvi S. Sigurdarson ,
Tobias Eifler  and
Martin Ebro
Nökkvi S. Sigurdarson*
Affiliation:
Technical University of Denmark (DTU); Novo Nordisk A/S
Tobias Eifler
Affiliation:
Technical University of Denmark (DTU);
Martin Ebro
Affiliation:
Novo Nordisk A/S
*
Contact: Sigurdarson, Nökkvi S, Danish Technical University (DTU), Department of Mechanical Engineering, Denmark, noksig@mek.dtu.dk

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

It is generally accepted in industry and academia that trade-offs between functional design objectives are an inevitable factor in the development of mechanical systems. These trade-offs can have a large influence on the achievable robustness and performance of the final design, with many products only functioning in narrow sweet-spots between different objectives. As a result, the design process of multi- functional products can be prolonged when designers concurrently attempt to find sweet-spots between a number of potentially interdependent trade-offs. This paper will show that designers only have six different approaches available when attempting to manage a trade-off while trying to ensure robustness and a sufficient performance. These fall within one of three categories; accept, optimise, or redesign. Selecting the wrong approach, can result in consequences downstream which can be difficult to predict, amongst others a lack of robustness to geometric variation, constrained performance, and long development lead time. This points to a substantial potential in the synthesis of design methods that support the identification and management of trade-offs in early product development.

Keywords

Robust designEmbodiment designOptimisationDesign trade-offs
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 3491 - 3500
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

References

Ahmed, S., Wallace, K. and Blessing, L. (2003), “Understanding the differences between how novice and experienced designers approach design tasks”, Research in Engineering design, Vol. 14 No. 1-1, pp. 1.Google Scholar
Altshuller, G.S. (1984), Creativity as an exact science: The theory of the solution of inventive problems, Taylor & Francis Group.Google Scholar
Andreasen, M.M. and Howard, T.J. (2011), “Is Engineering Design Disappearing from Design Research?”, Chapter 2, Future of Design Methodology, Springer-Verlang, London.Google Scholar
Andersson, P. (1997), “On Robust Design in the Conceptual Design Phase: A Qualitative Approach”, Journal of Engineering Design, Vol. 8, pp. 75–89.Google Scholar
Arthur, W.B. (1993), “Why do things become more complex?” Scientific American, May 1993, p. 144.Google Scholar
Boothroyd, G., Dewhurst, P. and Knight, W. (2002), Product design for manufacture & assembly, Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Ebro, M. and Howard, T.J. (2016), “Robust Design principles for reducing variation in functional performance”, Journal of Engineering Design, Vol. 26 No. 1-3, pp. 75–92.Google Scholar
Eppinger, S.D. and Browning, T.R. (2012), Design structure matrix methods and applications, MIT press.Google Scholar
French, M. (1971), Conceptual Design for Engineers, Springer, Berlin.Google Scholar
Frey, D., Palladino, J., Sullivan, J. and Atherton, M. (2007), “Part Count and Design of Robust Systems”, Systems Engineering, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 2007.Google Scholar
Göhler, S.M. and Howard, T.J. (2015), “The Contradiction Index (CI): A New Metric Combining System Complexity and Robustness for Early Design Stages”, Proceedings of the ASME IDETC/CIE 2015.Google Scholar
Göhler, S.M., Frey, D. and Howard, T.J. (2016), “A model based approach to associate complexity and robustness in engineering systems”, Research in Engineering Design, pp. 1–12.Google Scholar
Ilevbare, I.M., Probert, D. and Phaal, R. (2013), “A review of TRIZ, and its benefits and challenges in practice”, Technovation, Vol. 33, pp. 30–37.Google Scholar
Marler, R.T. and Arora, J.S. (2004), “Survey of multi-objective optimization methods for engineering”, Structural & Multidisciplinary Optimisation, Vol. 26, pp. 369–395.Google Scholar
Matthiassen, B. (1997), Design for Robustness and Reliability - Improving Quality Consciousness in Engineering Design, Technical University of Denmark 1997.Google Scholar
Mistree, F., Hughes, O. and Bras, B. (1993), “The Compromise Decision Support Problem and the Adaptive Linear Programming Algorithm”, Structural Optimization: Status and Promise, AIAA, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Olesen, J. (1992), Concurrent Development in Manufacturing – based upon dispositional mechanisms, PhD-Thesis, Technical University of Denmark.Google Scholar
Otto, K. and Antonsson, E. (1991), “Trade-off strategies in engineering design”, Research in Engineering Design, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 87–104.Google Scholar
Pahl, G. and Beitz, W. (1996), Engineering Design: A systematic approach, Springer, Berlin.Google Scholar
Papalambros, P. and Wilde, D. (2017), Principles of Optimal Design - Modelling and Computation, 3rd edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Ross, A., Hastings, D. and Warmkessel, J. (2004), “Multi-attribute Tradespace Exploration as Front End for Effective Space System Design”, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Vol. 41 No. 1.Google Scholar
Suh, N.P. (2001), Axiomatic Design - Advances and Applications, Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, T.C. (1993), A general decomposition methodology for optimal system design, Doctoral dissertation, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Vianello, G. and Ahmed-Kristensen, S. (2012), “A comparative study of changes across the lifecycle of complex products in a variant and a customised industry”, Journal of Engineering Design, Vol. 23 No. 2.Google Scholar