A spectral analytic study of some postulates concerning engineering design and related processes

In order to perform engineering design activities aiming at the design of new or redesign of existing products, a number of alternative processes, methods and techniques are available in the literature to the engineering designer/product developing enterprise. These processes, methods and techniques, are usually not explicitly expressed in terms of directives as to when and how they are to be used in the actual design of the product-to-be. An important goal in product development of today is to fulfill the terms for sustainable development, thus emphasizing the need to develop products which are not overexploiting the available resources provided by nature. By utilizing an approach to development and design based on bionics, i.e. utilizing biological methods and systems found in nature as a means of creating technical solutions, a conceptual framework is provided which is especially fit to accommodate the striving for sustainability. Striving for lightweight designs provides a significant potential to reduce the energy consumption of the product-to-be, which at present is a highly prioritized goal within sustainable development. Up until now, the dominating approach to lightweight designs has been to utilize lightweight materials such as different types of composites and metallic materials such as aluminum, magnesium and titanium. By introducing biomimicry into the engineering design process, an additional step towards efficient lightweight design solutions might be within reach. Since the objects created by nature are independent of costs and time, these are most often very complex especially regarding shapes and dimensions. In order to match these constraints in the creation of technical solutions (products), it is necessary to utilize optimization in combination with a flexible manufacturing process. The ideal manufacturing method to meet these demands is Additive Manufacturing (AM), though, at least for the time being, it imposes some constraints in size, costs etc. of the product to be manufactured. If the product designed is to be suitable for manufacturing for AM, it must be optimized, and so must the way it is to be processed. Therefore three of the most essential problems which need to be addressed in order to efficiently utilize AM are also elaborated upon and reported in the paper. The first of these problems is how to optimize the product-to-be. The second is to establish the orientation in which the product is to be manufactured during the AM process. The third is to find the best usage of the support material in the 3D printer, as there is no optimized process available for this activity. This is mainly due to the difficulties to foresee the waste of building material as, in most cases, this material can only be used once. In this paper, a process for the design and development of new products is proposed. The application of the process also includes essential elements to assure an efficient use of AM as mentioned above. The process is established on the basis of an integration of the Biomimicry Design Spiral, Bionic Structures and Elements and optimization into the Engineering Design Process. The utilization of the process is demonstrated by an application and reported in the form of a modified engineering design process — the Engineering Design and Biomimicry Design Process or the EDBP process for short.

A lot of emphasis is being placed on the research experience at undergraduate level both by institutions of higher learning as well as industries focusing on research&development (R&D). This requires a twofold effort. First is to develop research competency in teaching faculty so that they can act like mentors and second is to develop a process so that the students develop basic research skills through practice. Parallels can be drawn between the Engineering Design (ED) process and research skill building process in terms of creativity and problem solving. Similar to the ED process, a converging and diverging process can be used to creative problem research. This process has been introduced as part of a course project at the third year level for the course Programming Industrial Automation Systems. This paper tries to demonstrate the process through which a structured literature survey is carried out by the students leading to a variety of research problems. This process is carried out as a team activity. Research assignments have been integrated in the course, which requires students to find information on automation related topic using both print and electronic resources available at the college library and on the Internet. Aiming to foster the development of technical information literacy and communication skills, the students are required to prepare a report based on a specific set of guidelines, followed by implementation of the solution and oral presentations of the topics researched. A lecture on the subject of identifying and using information resources is included in the syllabus. Preliminary results of the study are presented along with directions for designing and implementing an enriched curriculum for Automation course.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 2625 Engineering Design as a Learning Process Rebecca Sidler Kellogg, Jerald Vogel Iowa State University Introduction Design of products, processes, and systems is the task that distinguishes the engineering profession. Either directly or indirectly most engineers are involved in the design process. Despite its central role in the engineering profession and its recognized importance1,2, most engineering students complete their undergraduate degrees with only a cursory glimpse at real engineering design. Their experience is often disconnected and incomplete as the curriculum tends to focus on skills requiring convergent thought processes. There are several arguments made in defense of the current engineering curriculum, where engineering science and analysis predominate. Possibly the most common is that these subjects are easier to present, amenable to large class sizes, and accommodate the teaching strategies that are popular and economical in university settings. Engineering design education requires small class sizes, one-on-one faculty-student interaction, active learning strategies, and teamwork; lectures and exams do not suffice. Proper engineering design education requires faculty that understand design and recognize its significance to engineering. Further, faculty must have the time and dedication required to integrate design throughout the entire curriculum. Design cannot be made to fit neatly in a one-semester course at the end of an undergraduate education. There are also those that believe that design processes are particular to various industries and therefore it would be overstepping boundaries to presume to teach such processes at the academic level. While this may be true that at lower levels of abstraction where specific knowledge and details are important, at higher levels of abstraction it can be shown that the basic processes are quite similar across disciplines and domains. Others claim that engineering design processes are ad hoc and rely on creativity and experience and thus should be addressed later during the student’s professional career where experts in individual fields or industries can serve as mentors. However, engineering design can be shown to be a systematic, cognitive process rather than an ad hoc endeavor. Although creativity and experience do play roles in the process, these do not preclude the possibility that engineering design can be effectively taught. There are many recognized means of promoting creative abilities3-6 that are available for classroom instruction. Contrary to what some educators may believe, students arrive with a base of experience from which their design abilities may successfully grow. A student has already spent a lifetime interacting with a world surrounded by design artifacts. If asked, most students can explain, at least on a conceptual level, how many complicated components or systems work or behave. Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2001, American Society for Engineering Education

Investigating the affordances of a CAD enabled learning environment for promoting integrated STEM learning

Engineering design is a structured and systematic process of finding solutions to meet certain requirements. Research in this field has focused heavily on developing more effective and efficient product realization process models. Today’s engineering design has become a knowledge intensive and collaborative process, requiring multidisciplinary design knowledge. Therefore, the modeling of knowledge flow plays a key role in determining a successful design alternative, which provides valuable insights into design problems for designers. This article proposes an ontological framework, purpose-function-working space-structure-behavior (PFWSB) for knowledge representation and knowledge flow based design process modeling. An illustrative case is also presented to demonstrate how to use the proposed framework to represent engineering design knowledge and describe the knowledge flow between decision makers during a design process. The results show that this framework can help designers capture the flow of knowledge in engineering design process more effectively.

Background To become qualified engineers, undergraduates must develop a contextualized epistemic cognition (EC) during the engineering design process (EDP), but little is known about their EC in the authentic EDP. This study aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of the EC and reported epistemic changes of undergraduate engineering students who served as EDP mentors in a secondary-school STEM-based community service-learning (CSL) project in Hong Kong. Harnessing the epistemic analytical model of Aims, Ideals, and Reliable Processes (AIR), this study qualitatively analyzed interviews with 11 undergraduate engineering students about the EDP during their mentorship experiences. Results Based on the empirical data, we refined the AIR model to AIRK by adding a new component, “K” (Knowledge resources), to better interpret undergraduate engineering students’ EC during the EDP. Furthermore, by analyzing undergraduate engineering students’ reflections on their epistemic changes through mentorship, we identified six aspects: (i) from learning theoretical knowledge to transforming knowledge to address societal needs; (ii) from an assignment-focused to a user-centered mindset; (iii) from recognizing the optimal solution to embracing the necessity for continuous improvement; (iv) from completing code to thinking creatively; (v) from a technology-centric mindset to valuing communication and collaboration; and (vi) gaining more interconnected STEM knowledge. Conclusions Our resulting AIRK model could provide a conceptual tool for understanding undergraduate engineering students’ EC in the EDP. The findings on reported epistemic changes demonstrated that mentoring secondary students in STEM projects could foster undergraduate engineering students’ EC development, revealing that the approach of university–school–community partnership can be practically sustainable and beneficial for adoption.

As part of an ongoing effort to better understand student problem-solving processes to openended problems, we have coded 14 mechanical engineering projects (representing about 60 journals) according to abstraction level, design activity, planning, and reporting. We also developed quantitative outcome measures that are reported in a separate submission to this conference. We then developed a computer model of the journal data that correlates 12 key process variables to design outcomes, and conducted a computer design of experiments to extract the effects that the process variables have on the response variables (i.e., project outcomes). In this paper we report the results of this modeling effort and discuss their implications for the general model of engineering problem-solving presented in various forms in many engineering textbooks. Our results suggest modifications to the engineering problem-solving model to make it more suitable for engineering students. Solving open-ended problems is arguably the cornerstone of the engineering endeavor. Employers look for engineers who are effective at solving open-ended problems. Engineering accreditation demands evidence that students can tackle open-ended problems proficiently. Much faculty effort is devoted to improving student skills in this area. The basic process model used for these kinds of problems starts with identification of need, then goes through information gathering, idea generation, evaluation and selection steps—in other words, a basic design process model. Our three-year study of student design processes suggests that the general model for engineering problem-solving may require some tweaking to make it a more effective model for engineering students. Over the decades, numerous models have been proposed to describe “the engineering design process.” However, few of these have been empirically validated or experimentally verified. Most have been developed through personal experience and accumulation of anecdotes. Furthermore, few models explicitly consider student processes relative to project outcomes. Our work attempts to further our understanding of problem-solving processes by gathering data from actual projects (one in which the participants have real stakes) in large enough sample sizes to enable statistical modeling that directly links design process to outcome. In this study, we analyzed data collected from 14 student mechanical engineering design projects, relating design process variables to project outcomes using statistical techniques. Our aim was to better understand what process characteristics tend to be associated with good design outcomes.

TracED: A tool for capturing and tracing engineering design processes

Infotech Enterprises Ltd. provides IT and engineering design services, and is certified for CMMI level 5, ISO 9000–2000, BS 7799, and AS9100. One of our major customers is a leading aero engines design and manufacturing company in the United States. The customer designs and manufactures jet engines, the most sophisticated breakthrough of the 20th century. Around 2001, this customer initiated work on development of an engineering design framework for constant innovation, greater productivity, and better success and profitability. It also aimed at resilience against serious loss of knowledge and experience as employees retire or leave suddenly. It is important for organizations to have the resilience to muster up the required size and skill mix of teams based on need, sometimes at a very short notice. An important component for this resilience is a framework that enables new entrants in the projects, whether employees or companies to which work is assigned, to quickly come up to speed as well as be able to do their work correctly. The framework consists of knowledge repository, design process, visual representation, quick navigation, standardization, and easy workflow.One of our large customers, a leading aero engine design and manufacturing company, under relentless pressure from customers and competitors, had been trying a radical change in the engineering design process. We started working on a solution jointly in 2002. The challenge was to develop a framework that is easy to learn and use, and has the capability for global deployment. We set up a team of IT specialists who were adept at grasping new technologies quickly. The first decision taken was to use a web browser interface that is commonly used. A standard document storage mechanism based on XML was decided upon. A unique and very convenient method of quickly navigating to the desired point from within a large diagram was developed on the browser. The first version was ready for deployment in 18 months.A 30 percent improvement in engineering design productivity had taken place once the implementation stabilized. By that time, all 4,000 design engineers in the organization were using the framework. Extracts relating to work outsourced to external companies were passed on to the suppliers, resulting in improvements. This increased organizational resilience in effectively managing varying levels of manpower resource requirement. Other companies of the group are now initiating similar frameworks. IT tools, especially web technologies and connectivity, now make it possible for an organization to implement such a framework within and across engineering design teams, both internal and external. IT should be leveraged by large companies to attain and maintain competitive leadership through resilience.KeywordsOrganizational resilienceknowledge repositoryengineering design productivitycompetitive leadership

Single-valued neutrosophic sets (SVNSs) and their application to material selection in engineering design. Liquid hydrogen is a feasible ingredient for energy storage in a lightweight application due to its high gravimetric power density. Material selection is an essential component in engineering since it meets all of the functional criteria of the object. Materials selection is a time-consuming as well as a critical phase in the design process. Inadequate material(s) selection can have a detrimental impact on a manufacturer’s production, profitability, and credibility. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is an important tool in the engineering design process that deals with complexities in material selection. However, the existing MCDM techniques often produce conflicting results. To address such problems, an innovative aggregation technique is proposed for material selection in engineering design based on truthness, indeterminacy, and falsity indexes of SVNSs. Taking advantage of SVNSs and smooth approximation with interactive Einstein operations, single-valued neutrosophic Einstein interactive weighted averaging and geometric operators are proposed. Based on proposed AOs, a robust MCDM approach is proposed for material selection in engineering design. A practical application of the proposed MCDM approach for material selection of cryogenic storage containers is developed. Additionally, the authenticity analysis and comparison analysis are designed to discuss the validity and rationality of the optimal decision.

The purpose of this research is to 1) develop an engineering design process on web application learning model to enhance web programming skills for Computer Education students; 2) develop a web application for use in the engineering design process-based learning model; 3) evaluate the students’ web programming skills; 4) compare students’ learning achievement before and after learning with the developed learning model; and 5) study the students’ satisfaction with the developed learning model. The research sample was 30 undergraduate students majoring in Computer Education at Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University, obtained by cluster sampling. The research instruments consisted of 1) an engineering design process on web application learning model; 2) a web application; 3) a web programming skills assessment test; 4) a learning achievement test; and 5) a satisfaction assessment. The statistics used were mean, standard deviation, and t-test. The results showed that 1) the engineering design process on web application learning model has the highest level of appropriateness. 2) The quality of the web application used in the engineering design process-based learning model is at a very good level in content and technical aspects. 3) Students’ web programming skills are higher than the set criteria of 80%. 4) Students’ learning achievement after learning is higher than before with a statistical significance level of 0.05. 5) Students are satisfied with the learning model at the highest level.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract High School Enterprise: Introducing Engineering Design in a High School Team Environment Abstract In efforts to promote interest in engineering careers among secondary students, across the country there are several current initiatives intended to introduce engineering concepts at pre- college levels. There are basically three approaches in use: teach the concepts in a course dedicated to engineering, blend them into traditional courses such as math and science, or expose students to engineering in a project work environment. For concepts such as engineering design and project management, the project-based approach may be best. High School Enterprise (HSE) offers a project-based learning environment well suited to the introduction of these concepts. HSE is an extra- or in-curricular school activity where students from grades 9-12 engage in authentic, inquiry-based STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) learning. Students participate on teams organized as virtual companies that develop products or services. Each year, there is a capstone event where secondary student teams gather on a university campus to present their project work alongside college teams to an audience of university faculty and students and industry representatives. The overarching goal of HSE is to seed and cultivate what will become a world-class and broadly inclusive science and technology workforce. Due to the long-term nature of the projects, there are many opportunities to introduce, and then spend significant time on, the engineering design process. To introduce engineering design concepts into this program, the topic was presented to teachers during a week-long workshop in the summers of 2008 and 2009. In 2008, the presentation was of a general nature and intended as a very basic introduction, while in 2009, a more extensive unit was presented encompassing both design and project management. This paper provides information on the current efforts to introduce engineering topics at the high school level and where HSE fits into this landscape. It describes the High School Enterprise program and how secondary students and teachers are exposed to engineering design. Some examples of student-project work from the 2008/2009 academic year that convey how students engage in the design process are included. Finally, the lessons learned to-date and how those lessons are helping to shape plans for future development and assessment are discussed. The National Landscape of High School Engineering Until just a few years ago, there were very few high schools that had any sort of engineering curriculum other than a small selection of graphics courses such as drafting and computer aided drafting. As of late, there has been a push to get more engineering content into high school curriculums. Today several state education standards address engineering to some degree, but there is considerable variation among those state standards, and the national effort to introduce such standards is still in its infancy. Indeed, the National Academy of Engineering is currently conducting a study (due out in March 2010) on K-12 engineering education standards. The Academy states: “The goal of this exploratory project is to assess the potential value and feasibility of developing and implementing content standards for engineering education in K- 12.” 1

Storytelling and the development of discourse in the engineering design process

Understanding the design process may reveal when and where resources should be focused and how engineers can better use tools, methods, and techniques to enhance the quality of designs and creative performance. The literature suggests the importance of iterative evaluation and reformulation in the engineering design process. The current study collected 111 high school students’ logs of designing an energy-saving house in Energy3D, a computer-aided design environment. Using a cross-lag model, we investigated the reciprocal relationship between students’ evaluation and reformulation behaviors and how these behaviors influence students’ design performance at the early, middle, and final design stages. The results suggest that there is a positive predictive relationship between students’ evaluation and reformulation process; reformulation positively predicts design performance and mediates the relationship between evaluation and design performance across time. These results provide empirical evidence of the importance of iterative evaluation and reformulation in the design process and implications for teachers and system designers to support students’ design.

Introduction Designing is a key component of professional practice in many fields of human endeavor (e.g., architecture, engineering, industrial design, art, and literature). For engineers, designing integrates engineering knowledge, skill, and vision in the pursuit of innovations to solve problems and enable modern life. With this understanding, engineering educators have, for several decades, been infusing their programs with design curricula and pedagogical experiences in order to enhance the design competencies of engineering graduates. Paralleling the development of these curricula and experiences, a growing body of research has been providing a scholarly basis for engineering design education. The goal of this chapter is to acquaint readers with engineering design education research and practice. To situate engineering design education in the larger context, we first present a brief history of research on design processes across several fields and then move to a more specific description of research on engineering design processes. We then focus on research that investigates effective ways to teach and assess the design process and review curricular structures and pedagogies that are commonly used in undergraduate engineering programs.