Browsing by Subject "Engineering design"

Now showing 1 - 13 of 13
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    The analysis and development of a mechanical breadboard structure
    (2006-12) Mikes, James Andrew; Wood, Kristin L.
    This thesis introduces the mechanical breadboard as a learning development tool and details the creation of one concept. It begins with a review of the state of the art for mechanical breadboards to include commercial and academic developments and products. It defines what a mechanical breadboard is for this research, what the customer needs are, and what critical functions the breadboard should be able to prototype. Following this analysis, a development team created a new novel structural system for a mechanical breadboard as the research indicated these components were both important to the overall system and had a great opportunity for innovation and improvement. The solution developed is based on node and frame member structural system that allows multiple degrees of freedom in the structural layout. The node is the key component of the structural system and utilizes a three section design to give multiple degrees of freedom and attachment points.
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    Design synthesis of multistable equilibrium systems
    (2004) King, Carey Wayne; Beaman, Joseph J.; Campbell, Matthew I.
    Mechanical systems are often desired to have features that can adapt to changing environments. Ideally these systems have a minimum number of parts and consume as little power as possible. Unfortunately many adaptable systems either have a large number of heavy parts and/or continuous actuation of smart materials to provide the adaptive capabilities. For systems where both adaptability and power conservation are desired characteristics, adaptability can be limited by power consumption. Multistable equilibrium (MSE) systems aim to provide a type of adaptable system that can have multiple mechanical configurations, or states, that require no power to maintain each stable configuration. Power is only needed to move among the stable states, and a level of adaptability is maintained. The stable equilibrium configurations are defined by a system potential energy being at a minimum. The design of a MSE system is based around locally shaping a potential energy curve about desired equilibrium configurations, both stable and unstable, such that the basic design goals of position, linearized natural frequency, and transition energy can be specified for the MSE system. By mapping the performance space from the design space in tandem with stochastic numerical optimization methods, the designer determines if a certain system topology can be designed as a MSE system. Qualitative and quantitative mapping procedures enable the designer to decide whether or not the desired design lies near the center or periphery of a performance space. The performance space is defined by the desired design criteria (i.e. locations of the equilibria, natural frequency at the equilibria, etc.) that the designer deems important. If the desired design lies near the periphery of the performance space, a series of optimization trials is performed. This series shows the tendency of the problem to be solved as the desired MSE system characteristics are varied within the performance space from a location where the solution is known to exist to the true desired location where the solution is not guaranteed to exist. Upon analysis of the resulting optimization trends, the designer is able to determine whether or not a feasible limit in the system performance has been reached.
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    Developing Biomimetic Design Principles for the Highly Optimized and Robust Design of Products and Their Components
    (2011-10-21) Wadia, Anosh Porus
    Engineering design methods focus on developing products that are innovative, robust, and multi-functional. In this context, the term robust refers to a product's ability to accomplish successfully its predetermined functions. Owing to the abundance of optimized and robust biological systems, engineering designers are now looking to nature for inspiration. Researchers believe that biomimetic or bio-inspired engineering systems can leverage the principles, mechanisms, processes, strategies, and/or morphologies of nature's successful designs. Unfortunately, two important problems associated with biomimetic design are a designer's limited knowledge of biology and the difference in biological and engineering terminologies. This research developed a new design tool that addresses these problems and proposes to help engineering designers develop candidate bio-inspired products or solutions. A methodology that helps users infer or extract biomimetic design principles from a given natural system or biomimetic product pair is described in this thesis. The method incorporates and integrates five existing design tools and theories to comprehensively investigate a given natural system or biomimetic product. Subsequently, this method is used to extract biomimetic design principles from 23 biomimetic products and natural systems. It is proposed that these principles have the potential to inspire ideas for candidate biomimetic products that are novel, innovative, and robust. The principle extraction methodology and the identified principles are validated using two separate case studies and a detailed analysis using the validation square framework. In the first case study, two students and the author use the principle extraction methodology to extract characteristics from a natural system and a biomimetic product pair. Results from this case study showed that the methodology effectively and repeatedly identifies system characteristics that exemplify inherent biomimetic design principles. In the second case study, the developed biomimetic design principles are used to inspire a solution for an engineering design problem. The resulting solution and its evaluation show that the design's achieved usefulness is linked to applying the biomimetic design principles. Similar to the TRIZ principles, the biomimetic design principles can inspire ideas for solutions to a given problem. The key difference is that designers using TRIZ leverage the solution strategies of engineering patents, while designers using the biomimetic design principles leverage nature?s solution strategies. The biomimetic design principles are compared to TRIZ and the BioTRIZ matrix.
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    Development of a design methodology and application to advance the field of highly mobile robotics
    (2011-05) Pace, Patrick Wayne; Wood, Kristin L.; Wood, John J.
    Developing innovative ideas as part of engineering design can be limited by the field of technology and the engineer's or design team's understanding of the field. Without sufficient understanding of an emerging technical field, ideation may be hampered by reinventing the proverbial wheel or by a lack of knowledge of the underlying physical principles and state of technology. The research presented here seeks to develop a tool and methodology intended to strengthen a designer’s or design team’s understanding of a field and relevant technologies in order to foster creative and innovative solutions. The presented inductive methodology consists of conducting a thorough review of existing relevant developing or commercially available technologies in order to obtain characteristic property data to be used as a basis of understanding. Analysis of the plotted data may lead to understanding existing trends, identifying voids where opportunities exist to expand the design space and general insights into the field. The effectiveness of using empirical data to look for innovation is investigated in the domain of highly mobile robots. Senior cadets from USAFA and UT Austin perform concept generation sessions before and after utilizing the proposed methodology to validate the effectiveness of the approach. The study at UT Austin validates the proposed methodology by measuring the quantity, quality, and novelty of the concepts generated before and after exposure to the methodology. These experiments demonstrate that state-of-technology design tools provide an effective foundation and platform for designers to generate a larger quantity of concepts. To further investigate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, it is used to develop a device within the field of highly mobile robotics. There exist applications of highly mobile robots which require innovative solutions with regard to overcoming obstacles, payload capacity, energy storage and minimizing power requirements. The methodology allows for the development of innovative concepts, and the embodiment and manufacture of a particular solution. The mechanical design solutions to multiple design challenges are presented, and the prototyped device proves capable of expanding the existing design space in terms of its performance with respect to the metrics mentioned above.
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    The effects of empathic experience design techniques on product design innovation
    (2010-05) Saunders, Matthew Nelson; Seepersad, Carolyn C.; Wood, Kristin L.
    The effects of empathic experience design (EED) on the product design process are investigated through a series of product redesign experimental studies. As defined, empathic experience design is the simulation of the experiences of a lead user, or someone who uses a product in an extreme condition. To better understand product innovation, the link between creativity in engineering design and commercial market success is explored through literature and a study of award-winning products is performed to analyze the current trends in innovation. The findings suggest that products are becoming increasingly more innovative in the ways in which they interact with users and their surroundings and that a gap exists between the current tools available for engineers to innovate and the types of innovations present in award-winning products. The application of EED to a concept generation study shows that empathic experiences while interacting with a prototype results in more innovative concepts over typical interactions. The experimental group also saw an increase in user interaction innovations and a decrease in technical feasibility. The application of EED to a customer needs study compares the effect of empathic experiences in an articulated use interview setting. The EED interviews discovered 2.5 times the number of latent customer needs than the control group. A slight decrease in the breadth of topics covered was also seen, but was compensated for when used in conjunction with categorical questioning. Overall the use of empathic experience design is shown to increase the level of innovation throughout the product design process.
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    Efficient Hardware Acceleration of Diversity Analysis
    (2019-08) Ramesh Babu, Maheshwaran
    Fault tolerance remains necessary in many safety and business critical applications like heart pace-makers, military radar systems, self driving vehicles, spacecraft, etc. In these environments failing to have a reliable system will lead to a catastrophic consequence. Reliability is a measure of the continuous delivery of correct service. Computer systems incorporating fault tolerance in their system try to duplicate or triplicate some major components to improve the probability of locating and detecting the faults. Duplicating multiple copies cannot protect the system against CMF (Common Mode Failure). Design Diversity is found to be the effective solution to counter the effectes of CMF. Design Diversity means to build different systems which are functionally the same but structurally different. Multiple designs are generated with the help of High Level Synthesis. With multiple designs generated we could analyze the diversity among the designs through Software Simulation or Hardware Acceleration. Diversity analysis is computationally intensive. In this research we have proposed a method to accelerate the analysis.
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    Foundations of a reverse engineering methodology
    (2011-05) Guillory, Jeremy Barrett; Wood, Kristin L.; Crawford, Richard H.
    Reverse engineering is broadly defined as the process of analyzing existing products to learn how to create better products in the future. Including reverse engineering as part of the engineering design process can provide a number of benefits, including a more thorough understanding of existing products, lower cost for the redesign of products, and faster times to market. While reverse engineering can be applied to a wide range of domains, this thesis deals with methodologies for extracting technical data from electro-mechanical products for the purpose of recreating them functionally and dimensionally, to an acceptable level of accuracy. An integrated and evolved reverse engineering methodology is presented. This new methodology is built upon previous work, and results from an effort to integrate all previous methods into the simplest and most useful form. Five novel reverse engineering techniques are introduced to solve problems previously unaddressed in the literature: Bounding Pertinent Geometry, Reassembly by Function, Determining Sample Size, Estimating Production Volume and Accounting for Physical Degradation. Throughout the thesis, a running example of the reverse engineering of the Craftsman Auto Hammer is used to illustrate the application of the evolved methodology.
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    How differences in interactions affect learning and development of design expertise in the context of biomedical engineering design
    (2009-05) Svihla, Vanessa; Petrosino, Anthony J. (Anthony Joseph), 1961-
    Authentic design commonly involves teams of designers collaborating on ill-structured problems over extended time periods. Nonetheless, design has been studied extensively in sequestered settings, limiting our understanding of design as process and especially of learning design process. This study addresses potential shortcomings of such studies by examining in-situ student team design. The participants of this study are three cohorts of a year-long capstone biomedical engineering design class at The University of Texas. Pilot research demonstrated advantages of a more authentic redesign task over a kit-based design task; students who chose devices to redesign were significantly better at representing perspective taking associated with customers' needs. Pilot research showed that there was no relationship between Early Efficiency (appropriate use of factual and conceptual knowledge) and Final Innovation of design products. I triangulated various methods for studying design: Qualitative research, Hierarchical Linear Modeling, and Social Network Analysis, the latter of which allowed me to generate team-level statistics of interaction (Cohesion), once I devised a practical method to account for missing data in a weighted network. Final Efficiency is a function of Early Innovation, early and late Cohesion, and team feasibility (factual and practical knowledge). Final Innovation is a function of Early Innovation, late Cohesion, and team Voice of the Customer (perspective-taking), with all relationships in both models positive. Measures of both design skills and interaction are required to explain variance in these outcomes. Narratives of team negotiation of design impasses --seemingly insurmountable barriers-- provide deeper understanding of relationships between design process and products. The case study teams spent a large percentage of their time engaged in problem scoping, but framed as engineering science rather than as engineering design. Only when they began prototyping did they transition towards being solution focused and frame the problem as engineering design. This left little time for iteration of the final design. Variance in timing of iteration may account for slight deviations of the case study teams from the statistical model. Recommendations include earlier opportunities to design and support for team collaboration. Social network analysis is recommended when learning is interactional and to support triangulation.
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    HyPerModels: hyperdimensional performance models for engineering design
    (2005) Turner, Cameron John; Crawford, Richard H.
    Engineering design is an iterative process where the designer determines an appropriate set of design variables and cycle parameters so as to achieve a set of performance index goals. The relationships between design variables, cycle parameters and performance indices define the design space, a hyperdimensional representation of possible designs. To represent the design space, engineers employ metamodels, a technique that builds approximate or surrogate models of other models. Metamodels may be constructed from a wide variety of mathematical basis functions but Hyperdimensional Performance Models (HyPerModels) derived from Non-Uniform Rational Bsplines (NURBs) offer many unique advantages when compared to other metamodeling approaches. NURBs are defined by a set of control points, knot vectors and the NURBs orders, resulting in a highly robust and flexible curve definition that has become the de facto computer graphics standard. The defining components of a NURBs HyPerModel can be used to define adaptive sequential sampling algorithms that allow the designer to efficiently survey the design space for interesting regions. The data collected from design space surveys can be represented with a HyPerModel by adapting NURBs fitting algorithms, originally developed for computer graphics, to address the unique challenges of representing a hyperdimensional design space. With a HyPerModel representation, visualization of the design space or design subspaces such as the Pareto subspace is possible. HyPerModels support design space analysis for adaptive sequential sampling algorithms, to detect robust design space regions or for fault detection by comparing multiple HyPerModels obtained from the same system. Significantly, HyPerModels uniquely allow multi-start optimization algorithms to locate the global metamodel optimum in finite time. Each of these capabilities is demonstrated with demonstration problems including brushless DC motor fault detection and composite material I-beam and gas turbine engine design problems with the HyPerMaps software package. HyPerMaps defines the necessary algorithms to adaptively sample a design space, construct a HyPerModel and to use a HyPerModel for visualization, analysis or optimization. With HyPerMaps, an engineering designer has a window into the hyperdimensional design space, allowing the designer to explore the design space for undiscovered design variable combinations with superior performance capabilities.
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    Investigating the innovation capabilities of undergraduate engineering students
    (2013-08) Williams, Paul T; Seepersad, Carolyn C.
    This thesis describes a method for measuring the innovation capabilities of mechanical engineering students and presents the results of a yearlong experiment. A review of relevant literature shows that it is unclear whether the innovation capabilities of engineering students increase or decrease over time. Experiments were conducted at two universities in which students were asked to redesign an everyday electromechanical product in a sketch-based concept generation activity. Student participants were also asked to complete a self-efficacy survey. Nearly one thousand concepts were generated from a combination of freshmen and seniors. The concepts were evaluated for originality, technical feasibility, and innovation characteristics by multiple raters. At both schools, the findings suggest that the senior-level engineering students are more creative than their freshman-level counterparts without sacrificing technical feasibility. Additionally, the seniors rated higher for originality at the end of the semester than they scored prior to taking their senior design class. These results suggest that the mechanical engineering curricula, and especially the senior-level Engineering Design courses, are having a positive effect on student creativity.
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    Performance and recovery under prolonged vibration,
    (Texas Tech University, 1969-01) Khalil, Tarek M.
    Not available
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    Spatial ability in high school geometry students
    (2011-08) Brudigam, Kristin Lea; Crawford, Richard H.; Petrosino, Anthony J.; Marshall, Jill
    The purpose of this study was to observe the differences in high school PreAP Geometry students in regards to spatial ability. The hypothesis states that students who are enrolled in both high school PreAP Geometry and Introduction to Engineering Design have better spatial ability skills than those students who are solely enrolled in PreAP Geometry. Of the 207 students enrolled in geometry at the test school, there was a smaller population (n = 57) simultaneously enrolled in an engineering graphics course at the high school. No direct or special intervention was given to either group of students. Near the end of the academic year, all students were administered the Purdue Visualization of Rotations Test (ROT). Results showed that students enrolled in the engineering design class performed better than those students not enrolled in the course. Furthermore, the males outperformed the females when all students were considered. However, there was not a significant difference among the males, nor was there a difference between males and females enrolled in engineering. Further research is needed to understand these differences and how geometry education plays a role in the development of spatial ability skills.
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    Tools for innovation and conceptual design
    (Texas A&M University, 2004-11-15) Karuppoor, Srinand Sreedharan
    The ability to design is the distinguishing characteristic of an engineer. Recent research has increased our understanding of both the engineering design process and effective means for teaching that process to neophyte design engineers. In that spirit, a design methodology was developed at the Institute for Innovation and Design in Engineering (IIDE), Texas A&M University. At the core of this approach is a design philosophy based on the cognitive skills of Abstraction, Critical Parameter Identification, and Questioning. This philosophy along with the design process is taught in the senior undergraduate design and graduate design courses. The goal of the methodology is not only to teach the design process to novice designers but also to instill in them the design philosophy that would enable them to perform design effectively and innovatively in any area of specialty. In this dissertation the design philosophy along with its role in the design methodology is explained. The Need Analysis and the Conceptual Design stages of the IIDE methodology are elaborated. The weaknesses in these stages are identified and addressed, by developing and incorporating design methods and techniques that fit the spirit and framework of the IIDE design methodology. The Object Function Method was developed to address certain aspects at the Need Analysis stage. There was need for an effective concept searching method within the Concept Design stage of the IIDE design methodology. This is addressed by the development of new search techniques and methods for effective concept discovery during concept searching. The usage and application of these methods and techniques is explained in detail along with examples. Additionally, this dissertation contains the results of a study conducted with two groups of senior design students, those who have been through the process and those who have not, to evaluate the effectiveness of applying the IIDE design philosophy and performing the Need Analysis and Conceptual Design stages for the given design challenge. The goal of the study was to investigate the relationship, if any, between the degree to which these aspects of the design methodology were followed and the quality of the resulting design solutions produced.