Browsing by Subject "Product design"
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Item Application of Product Design Concepts and Hybrid System Dynamics to Demonstrate Zeno Behavior and Zeno Periodic Orbits in a Physical Double Pendulum Setup(2012-07-16) Kothapalli, BhargavThis thesis aims to explain how the concepts of functional modeling are implemented in the development and validation of real-world hybrid dynamic systems. I also discuss how control theory is integrated with the design process in order to understand the significance of periodic orbits on a simple dynamic system. Two hybrid system applications with different levels of complexity will be considered in this thesis ? an anthropomorphic Bipedal walking robot and a Double Pendulum with a mechanical stop. The primary objectives of this project are to demonstrate the phenomena of Zeno and zeno periodic orbits in hybrid dynamic systems involving impacts. Initially, I describe the salient features of the product design procedure and then explain the significance of functional modeling as a part of this process. We then discuss hybrid dynamic systems and the occurrence of Zeno behavior in their mathematical form. Also, the necessary conditions for existence of Zeno and zeno equilibrium points are provided. Then the theory of completed Lagrangian hybrid systems is explained in detail. We then examine the two hybrid dynamic systems being considered for this project. Prior research undertaken on bipedal walking is explored to understand their design and achievement of stable walking gaits with appropriate actuation mechanisms. Based on this insight, a suitable design procedure is employed to develop the bipedal robot model. The desired actuation mechanisms for all the configurations considered for this model as well as the challenges faced in employing optimal actuation will be discussed. However, due to the high level of complexity of the bipedal robot model, a simpler hybrid dynamic system is considered to simplify fabrication and control of the model. This is the motivation behind designing and building the Double Pendulum model with a mechanical stop in an attempt to observe zeno behavior in this system. We begin by formally demonstrating that the ?constrained? double pendulum model displays Zeno behavior and complete this Zeno hybrid system to allow for solutions to be carried past the Zeno point. The end result is periods of unconstrained and constrained motions in the pendulum, with transitions to the constrained motion occurring at the Zeno point. We then consider the development of a real physical pendulum with a mechanical stop and introduce non-plastic impacts. Later, we verify through experimentation that Zeno behavior provides an accurate description of the behavior of the physical system. This provides evidence to substantiate the claim that Zeno behavior, while it does not technically occur in reality, provides an accurate method for predicting the behavior of systems undergoing impacts and that the theory developed to understand Zeno behavior can be applied to better understand these systems.Item Beleaf : an earth-friendly solution to disposable dinnerware(2011-05) Adhikary, Amrita Prasad; Hall, Peter, 1965-; Olsen, Daniel M., 1963-This report is a documentation of an investigative design process that looks at how small shifts in established systems can be reconfigured to make big changes. It is an attempt at establishing a framework for designing sustainable solutions with the environment and social good in mind. In addressing the problems resulting from our indiscriminate use of plastic disposable dinnerware and offering a viable and earth-friendly system solution to the same, I am interested in reminding fellow designers that accountability towards the environment is the new design reality. The report advocates methods that synthesize design for people, profit, and most importantly, the planet. By using plates made from fallen leaves, the user fulfills his specific need for disposable dinnerware while simultaneously participating in an environmental task of closing the loop through responsible disposal and composting.Item Designing for lived experience : a suite of tools for people with Type 1 diabetes(2014-05) Kinbarovsky, Jesse Israel; Catterall, Kate; Gorman, Carma; Stuckey, HeatherDiabetes is a chronic, patient-managed illness. Type 1 diabetics must maintain near-constant awareness of their blood sugar levels and perform frequent medical interventions in order to remain alive and healthy. Research has shown that symptoms of poor treatment adherence manifest both physically and emotionally. While a great deal has been written about, and many products designed for, treatment of physiological symptoms and outcomes, far less has been written about, and even fewer products designed to address, the emotional experience of the type 1 diabetic. Yet the emotional effects of chronic illness have been well documented, including the effects of blood glucose variation on mood (Penckofer, 2012) and increased comorbid depression among diabetics (Anderson, 2001). For my thesis project, I have created a connected system of physical and digital tools called the t1D Suite that addresses the unique emotional needs of people with diabetes, thereby bridging the gap between life-giving treatment and life-enriching experience.Item Developing green design guidelines: a formal method and case study(2009-12) Telenko, Cassandra; Webber, Michael E., 1971-; Seepersad, Carolyn C.This thesis describes and demonstrates a method for consolidating, developing, and using green design guidelines for the innovation of greener products. Life cycle analysis (LCA) is one well-accepted tool for quantifying the environmental impacts of a product so designers can identify areas for redesign effort. However, LCA is a retrospective design tool that requires detailed design information that isn’t known until designs are near completion. Alternatively, green design guidelines provide proven techniques for designing greener products. They can be used during the early stages of design, when many decisions fundamental to innovation and environmental impact are made and before LCA is viable. This thesis extends the work already done in green design guidelines, by updating the current knowledge base and introducing a method for extending the set of existing guidelines to encompass new and emerging areas of sustainability. While guidelines have been created from prior experience in design for environment and life cycle analysis, they have not been maintained as a shared and coordinated repertoire of green design solutions. Instead, sets of guidelines are scattered throughout the literature, contain overlaps, operate at different levels of abstraction, and have varying levels of completeness. For example, some areas of green design guidelines, such as design for disassembly, are well established, while other areas of green design guidelines, such as minimizing energy consumption during use, are still being explored. Additionally, while numerous examples of green design guidelines exist, many of the guidelines have no documented validation of their life cycle impacts. The work for this thesis began with the compilation of a dynamic knowledge base of green design guidelines. This set of guidelines is a consolidation and updating of the green design guidelines already available in literature and can be used as a starting poinrt for future improvements and extensions as the field develops. A standard method was then proposed and tested for creating guidelines in currently undeveloped areas of green design, particularly energy consumption during the operation of a product. The method employs reverse engineering techniques and life cycle analysis to identify green requirements and develop corresponding, new green design guidelines. A case study of electric kettles demonstrated the usefulness of the method by yielding four new guidelines and four, corresponding, energy saving re-designs. For this example, the redesigns showed that guidelines can reduce energy consumption, but may incur tradeoffs with other life cycle stages. Calculation of tradeoffs revealed a range of net life cycle impact values that were caused by increased manufacturing demands and variability in consumer use habits. In addition to redesign in the kettle study, the four new guidelines were tested for usefulness in new product design by use of focus groups. Two groups were tasked with designing a new energy efficient toaster concept. Only one group was given the four green design guidelines that were uncovered using the proposed method. The design group using the new green design guidelines produced more viable and practical green features than the design group that did not have the guidelines as a design tool. These preliminary results suggest that the proposed method is useful for creating new guidelines that are beneficial to design teams tackling novel design problems that differ from the original case study. Further work is needed to establish the statistical significance of these results.Item Development of principles and facilitators for transformational product design(2006-05) Skiles, Stewart Mason; Wood, Kristin L.Transformational design is the creation of devices that change state in order to facilitate new or enhance existing functionality. While these states can exist in a wide range of domains, this thesis deals primarily with mechanical transformers. These products have several benefits as compared to single-state designs; in addition to increased functionality, more efficient storage capabilities and increased aesthetic appeal are possible. An inductive study was performed to develop a theory for the design of mechanical transforming devices. Patents were collected for reconfigurable products, and a set of principles and facilitators were extracted for their design. Three methodologies are presented for the work: a collection methodology used to locate patents, a patent dissection method used to determine the principles and facilitators, and an application tool used to generate transformer concepts that can be integrated into a generic design methodology. Finally, the design tool is used to apply the principles and facilitators to the development of two new transforming devices.Item 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.Item An empirical study of the effectiveness of empathic experience design(2012-05) Johnson, Daniel Glenn; Seepersad, Carolyn C.; Crawford, Richard H.Engineers recognize the need for innovation in product design, and many methods are available for creating more innovative products and better satisfying customer needs. Empathic Experience Design (EED) is one such method. The EED method exposes the designer to empathic experiences, which are intended to help the designer empathize with customers who use the product under a variety of non-ideal conditions and then transfer that enhanced understanding to an ensuing concept generation activity. This thesis studies the effectiveness of the EED methodology when used in conjunction with three types of empathic experiences: sensory, physical, and cognitive. Experiments were conducted over the course of two years, in which students were asked to develop concepts for a next-generation alarm clock or litter collection device; the resulting concepts were analyzed to determine the originality and technical quality of each concept. The subject group concepts, which were developed after participating in empathic experiences, were compared with the control group concepts, which were developed without empathic experiences. The subject group concepts demonstrated significantly higher originality than the control group concepts, without measurable sacrifices in technical quality, as well as significant increases in innovative features related to user interactions. The method has been shown to be effective for enhancing innovation when the empathic experiences are aimed at sensory and kinematic priming activities that challenge a user’s sensory or physical capabilities.Item Flexibility : design for evolution(2006-05) Qureshi, Atif Muzaffar; Wood, Kristin L.Contemporary products need to evolve to accommodate competitive market pressures, rapid technological change and transient and multi-dimensional customer requirements. Product flexibility is defined as the adaptability of a system in response to these factors. In this work, a set of formal principles is presented for guiding the design of flexible products. These principles are derived from the results of an empirical study of the United States patent repository. As part of the study, patents are analyzed with a dissection tool, and representative principles are derived from the data. The utility of these principles is demonstrated via the design of a flexible fuel cell system. The effectiveness of these principles is validated using a Change Modes and Effects Analysis (CMEA) tool to compare the resulting fuel cell concept to a typical device of similar functionality. Finally, a new product, the flexible flashlight, is invented using these principles to guide concept generation. The flexibility of this product is validated by an examination of possible future evolutions and their impact on the original design.Item 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.Item 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.Item A low-cost volume adjustable lower limb prosthetic socket : design and evaluation(2014-08) Vaughan, Meagan Renee; Crawford, Richard H.An issue of great concern for amputees continues to be lack of proper fit and comfort in their sockets. This lack can often be attributed to changes in the shape of the residual limb that cannot be compensated for by existing prosthetic socket technology. In regions where cost is a prohibitive factor in the replacement of ill-fitting prosthetic sockets, the need for a volume adjustable, and potentially longer lasting, socket design is abundant. This research focuses on designing a volume adjustable lower limb prosthetic socket that accommodates the needs of amputees in underdeveloped countries using collaborative design techniques. Though advocated as a means of accurately identifying and satisfying their needs, including end-users in the design process often adds an additional layer of complexity because of differences in culture, language, or geography among the participants. This research therefore includes a study in which product design techniques were applied to the same volume adjustable socket design problem with a variety of users – typical users, lead users, and new Empathic Lead Users - from different countries, one developed and one developing. To overcome differences among participants, this research includes an alternative strategy to create Empathic Lead Users (ELU) from non-user product design engineers through the use of simulated lead user experiences. As a result of this study, customer needs analysis with ELU helps to identify 95% of traditional and lead user customer needs and 100% more latent needs, and possibly more avenues for product innovations, than interviewing lead or traditional users alone. The concepts generated by all users were also compared. Based on the resulting concepts’ novelty, variety, quality, and quantity, all users were able to satisfactorily complete the concept generation exercises and produced competitive design solutions. Using the concepts generated during this co-design study, a volume adjustable socket was developed. The final socket design, based on the analogous rotational movement of a camera aperture, is pursued through mechanical and subject testing. Early users of the socket liked the design and it has been demonstrated to provide the necessary volume adjustments, but future design iterations to improve its comfort are necessary.Item Metaphor as design inspiration(2004) Qian, YanYan; Not availableItem Representing product architecture and analyzing evolvable design characteristics(2010-08) Tilstra, Andrew Harold; Seepersad, Carolyn C.; Wood, Kristin L.; Campbell, Matthew I.; Nichols, Steven P.; Evans, Robert S.There is a strong connection between a product’s architecture and the ease with which it can be evolved into future generations of products. The main goal of this dissertation is to create a measurement tool that can assess the extent to which a design exhibits different characteristics of being flexible for future evolution. The High Definition Design Structure Matrix (HDDSM) is presented as a product representation model that captures the specific types of interactions between components of a product. An interaction basis is defined that extends the detailed flows of signal, material, and energy used in functional modeling to include detailed spatial interactions. By including an external element to represent all interactions that cross outside of the product boundary, the HDDSM is shown to be a modular product model. A process for reverse engineering products and creating a HDDSM is presented and shown to significantly reduce the effort required to create a HDDSM model. The repeatability of the HDDSM model is evaluated by calculating the interrater agreement between models created by independent examiners. Four analysis processes are presented to analyze the HDDSM model for characteristics of evolvable design. These characteristics are taken from design guidelines for product flexibility for future evolution. The analyses produce quantitative metrics that allow an examiner to measure and compare how well a particular characteristic of evolvable design has been incorporated based only on the component interactions recorded in the HDDSM. Three of the metrics, the Space Potential Ratio, the Framework metric, and the Energy-Flow Module metric are shown to be consistent with a product’s flexibility for future evolution as measured by a Change Modes and Effects Analysis.Item The war at home : a veteran's use of critical design methods for post-deployment reintegration(2015-05) Perez, Jose Manuel; Catterall, Kate; Sonnenberg, StephenMany combat veterans underestimate the on-going traumatic effects of war, effects that eventually surface in civilian life, causing health, relationship and career problems. During a deployment, emotions such as vigilance, anger, and fear are beneficial for the soldier and aide in coping with multiple combat-related adversities. Suppression of emotions that do not assist the soldier or mission during deployment is necessary and becomes habitual as it helps the soldier stay motivated and focused for the duration of the deployment. Post-deployment, the coping mechanisms previously necessary for survival, contribute to the difficulties of reintegration. The problems encountered by veterans can include, but are not limited to: social withdrawal, economic decline, self-medication, and most problematic, suicidal tendencies. As a veteran myself, I began to ask, is there another way to prepare veterans for re-entry to civilian life, to prevent unnecessary hardships and tragedies, educate them in unfamiliar ways, and perhaps contribute to an effective healing process? As a designer I approached these questions, searching for a way to communicate the adversities veterans face from an unexpected angle. Presented here are prototypes, diagrams, and warning systems designed to help veterans 1) be more self-aware and alert to the symptoms of posttraumatic stress and depression, 2) engage the armed forces and the VA in a discussion about innovative and more effective ways to talk about and treat the psychologically damaged soldier, and 3) foster communities to support veterans in their re-entry to civilian life. The objects I designed for my thesis exhibition are not intended to correct a complex problem such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or moral injury. Instead, they are created as a collection of tools to facilitate difficult conversations, provoke thought, and as an alternative approach to reach combat veterans who are in their own process of reintegration. My work is one method to process the effects of war through a non-destructive practice for those veterans who may not pay attention to the wall of pamphlets or other forms of disseminating information.