Product design and engineering

In the last few decades photo-polymerization, the use of light for curing resins, has been a field of multidisciplinary research particularly involving advanced materials and technologies to restore a tooth. Polymers and composites used in the oral cavity in conjunction with light curing process represent the material and technology objective of this patent review article. The scenario related to polymers, composite formulations and light curing devices in relation to material performance in vitro and in vivo is presented. Current and future developments related to engineering of materials, technologies and clinical approaches to dental restoration will be considered and estimated. © 2009 Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.

Keywords: Bone , Composite , Dentin , Light curing , Mechanical properties , Polymers , Restorative materials

International competition intensification and product development process shortening have heightened the pressure to innovate, representing this issue nowadays a hallmark of all mature companies. Product innovation process is not always successful, due to its high level of uncertainty which makes difficult the best technical solutions selection, notably during the early stages of the product development process. Even if the decision making phase appears to be critical, formal and effective methodologies and tools are not often systematically applied in industry, and furthermore they lack both of rigor and of the capacity to really support human decision-making phases. In this paper a design paradigm is discussed in order to support the early phases of the product innovation process. Once evaluated the high potentials of TRIZ theory in supporting the idea generation phase, this work is focused on testing and improving the u-sDSP decision making approach in order to enable an agile implementation of this formal technique in the industrial context. The authors' proposed methodology is then applied to an industrial case study from the domestic appliances industry.

Keywords: Decision-based engineering design , Product innovation , Project screening

The application of life cycle assessment (LCA) is usually aimed at products where most parameters relating to architecture, processes and materials are defined and known. However, application of conventional LCA for products or services that are incomplete in their specification is quite difficult or even impossible, if too many significant parameters are unknown. In our previous work targeting the development of eco-design tools, an approach integrating LCA methodology with the concept of product modularity has been introduced. In this paper, further improvements of this novel approach, being based on fuzzy logic and its application, are presented. In this context, fuzzy logic is being used to increase user friendliness of the interface while avoiding any circumstances of compromising the precision of quantitative results computed. A set of fuzzy attributes, membership functions and an inference algorithm are used to evaluate the modification of design parameters of modular products regarding their influence on environmental impact indicators. Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Keywords: AFF , Alternative function fulfilment , Fuzzy logic , LCA , Life cycle assessment , Modular product architecture , Sustainable manufacturing

The chapter discusses the wealth generation mechanisms of the industrialism from its intrinsic cultural start, associated with the western-world stile. The prospected remarks single out several characterising features, in opposition to the east-Asia habits and cultural marks. Among other points, noteworthy remarks lead to prise complexity, instead of exploiting the reductionism. This is recognised as the robot age sign, opposed to the industry age patterns. The all discussion does not provide full solutions, rather suggests looking at the industrialism founding motivations (up to the cultural backing), in view to devise worthy alternatives. © 2010, IGI Global.

The robot mine clearing, based on cheap farming equipment, aims at transforming the terrorist antipersonnel mine into useless practice, after that the land reclamation is readily fulfilled by standard means. The paper addresses the following lines: to conceive and implement lowcost robotic equipment, assuring effective, safe and reliable demining; to allow simple equipment integration, with resort to low-cost and widely available agricultural fixtures; to provide the basis for on-duty assessment and training assistance by alarm (warning, emergency) effective management; to make easier the operators groundwork, involved in self-learning and up-grading duties. The mixedmode automation, through remote-steered robotic effectors, grants balanced resources use on the strategic, tactical and execution horizons.

Demining is calamity of third world countries. The clearing is ceaseless, more expensive than the spreading, and terrorist return is obtained by weakening of the antagonistic population. The mines are cheapest weapon, built to make horrible injuries, affecting active people, with major falls-off into economic growth. The disaster is notably cruel in Sri Lanka, with anti-person mines spread in the northeast region. After the ceasefire, the international organisations started the mine sweeping, with poor issues, due to politico-economical motivations in direct bond with wants in the technical effectiveness. The pitiable situation is worsened, as most rich lands are removed from farming exploitation, with increasing of the internally displaced persons. Now, clearing is engineering duty, and the humanitarian goal comes to be technical challenge. The advanced robotics fulfils clean and reliable tasks, on condition to upgrade sophistication and cost and to loose third-world appropriateness. The challenge is to turn local machines and awareness into effective robotic aids, willingly used by the local people, and to enhance the on-going outcomes. The analysis, mainly, addresses the following points: - the engaged technologies need to provide special purpose outfits and to involve operators having adapted uniformity; - the work-flow pre-setting ought to detail the duty-cycles and to establish the standard achievements; - the planning has to specify the on-process warning/emergency management and the failure protection rules; - the operators' instruction and training shall aim at off-process optimised work-flows to circumvent risky issues; - the effectiveness comes from organised routine agendas, in conformity with allotted tasks and emergency events. This is a mix of organisational and technologic demands, calling for responsible commitment of the involved people, so that the local Civil Service is entitled to do the clearing operations, and the all engaged community is solidly concerned. The winning solution shall look at low-cost robotic outfits, to be obtained with resort to nearby available resources and competences (e.g., drawn on from the local agricultural machinery and know-how), and full account of the cost limits, while aiming at the process effectiveness by the mix of enabling cues, principally deferred to enhancing the regional awareness and the factual dedication. The paper stresses on fairly unorthodox robots, addressing unmanned effectors facilities joined with intelligent remote- command abilities, not as advanced achievements, rather as cheapest productivity upgrading, assembled from standard farming devices, through the shared know-how and commitment of locally involved operators. Copyright © 2008 by ASME.

Purpose - Humanitarian demining is addressed as an engineering-driven duty, aiming at optimal price/effectiveness figures, joining low-cost robotics and flexible automation. The mine sweeping is highly dangerous task, and safety is sought by automatic rigs, with remote steering and control. The small price is achieved with resort to locally available equipment, technology and know-how. Design/methodology/approach - The robotic solutions are split at three levels: the mobility enabler, exploiting standard agricultural machinery; the demining outfits, specialising cheap end-effectors; the robot path planner, exploring reliable remote govern options. The approach aims at the pace-wise deployment of consistent rigs with assessed productivity and tiny investment. Findings - The paper explores basic ideas to modify common agricultural machines, placing in front proper effectors and specifying the guidelines needed to choose both carriers and suitable demining tools. The remote command logic of the suggested demining strategy is then outlined, specifying the communication and instrumentation for the case study. Finally, the warning/emergency occurrences management is described. Practical implications - The ensuing robotic equipment joins the remote-command abilities, with safe and reliable management of dangerous tasks and emergency healing, to the technological appropriateness (shared know-how and commitment) and the price tag fitness (on-place device availability). The final set-up grants dramatic up-grading, as compared with the current demining practice. Originality/value - Unmanned mine-clearing is presently a sophisticated accomplishment of the industrialised countries' armies. By the prospected methods/fixtures, the technical/economic feasibility of the practice is shown to be practicable in third-world countries. © 2009 Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Keywords: Explosives , Hazardous materials , Remote control systems , Robotics

The study deals with the extended manufacturers' responsibility, asking on-duty eco-servicing and end-of-life recovery, for the put in the market products. The product-service provision is acknowledged solution, which greatly benefits from networked layouts. The function/facility assembly, each time necessary, is made available at different structure levels, depending on the legal liability and intra-organisational setting. The networking value added pertains to the intangibles domain and its appraisal ought to preserve the layout complexity. The outlined evaluation procedure aims at merging synthetic views of the supply chain project, net-concern setting and governing policies, after combined self-assessment checks, to offer the reference frame to recognise the alternative actual potentials. © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Keywords: extended enterprise , networking appraisal , organisational value , product-service

TRIZ literature presents several papers and even books claiming the efficiency of Altshuller's Laws of Engineering System Evolution as a means for producing technology forecasts. Nevertheless, all the instruments and the procedures proposed so far suffer from poor repeatability, while the increasing adoption of innovation as the key factor for being competitive requires reliable and repeatable methods and tools for the analysis of emerging technologies and their potential impact. The present paper proposes an original algorithm to perform a functional analysis aimed at building a Network of Evolutionary Trends for a given Technical System with repeatable steps. Such a goal has been achieved by integrating well known models and instruments for system description and function representation. The overall procedure has been already validated in a number of industrial case studies and it's here clarified by means of an example about the production of tablets in the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector.

Keywords: EMS model , FBS model , Functional basis , Laws of engineering systems evolution , Technology forecasting , TRIZ

In a recent project the authors have proposed the adoption of Optimization Systems [1] as a bridging element between Computer-Aided Innovation (CAI) and PLM to identify geometrical contradictions [2], a particular case of the TRIZ physical contradiction [3]. A further development of the research [4] has revealed that the solutions obtained from several topological optimizations can be considered as elementary customized modeling features for a specific design task. The topology overcoming the arising geometrical contradiction can be obtained through a manipulation of the density distributions constituting the conflicting pair. Already two strategies of density combination have been identified as capable to solve geometrical contradictions and several others are under extended testing. The paper illustrates the most recent results of the ongoing research mainly related to the extension of the algorithms from 2D to 3D design spaces. The whole approach is clarified by means of two detailed examples, where the proposed technique is compared with classical multi-goal optimization.

Keywords: Computer-Aided Conceptual Design , Computer-Aided Innovation , Embodiment Design , Topological optimization , TRIZ

Many different applications of online product inspections have found a significant advantage by the use of 3D scanners, especially when working with complex surfaces (free-form,), where traditional inspection tools proved to have significant limitations. Unfortunately, there are not only success stories, but also several situations in which the approach towards 3D scanner technologies has been unsuccessful. This is mainly due to the fact that it is hard to understand which 3D scanner solution is the best to adopt and which working protocol is to be followed in order to obtain the best results from a specific application. These problems are often caused by the absence of a long expertise in 3D scanners and by the presence of inappropriate technical sheets. These last are, in fact, quite fragmented and inhomogeneous and only provide little information about the device behavior in the different working scenarios since they tend to be more oriented to the theoretical metrological performances. Most of the time, this information is not useful for users, who need to have a unique map showing both 3D scanner technical performances and their correlations to the different working scenarios in order to be able to compare the several available systems and to get a better understanding of their usage. In order to provide a solution to this problem, this paper proposes to create a customer benchmarking methodology that is a mixture of benchmark geometry designs and experiment sets. This benchmarking methodology will be focused on the simulation of a computer-aided inspection working scenario and carried out by using the quality function deployment method, in order to be oriented towards customer needs. © 2008 Springer-Verlag London Limited.

Keywords: 3D scanner , Laser scanner , Quality function deployment , Reverse engineering

Both product design and manufacturing are intrinsically collaborative processes. From conception and design to project completion and ongoing maintenance, all points in the lifecycle of any product involve the work of fluctuating teams of designers, suppliers and customers. That is why companies are involved in the creation of a distributed design and a manufacturing environment which could provide an effective way to communicate and share information throughout the entire enterprise and the supply chain. At present, the technologies that support such a strategy are based on World Wide Web platforms and follow two different paths. The first one focuses on 2D documentation improvement and introduces 3D interactive information in order to add knowledge to drawings. The second one works directly on 3D models and tries to extend the life of 3D data moving these design information downstream through the entire product lifecycle. Unfortunately the actual lack of a unique 3D Web-based standard has stimulated the growing up of many different proprietary and open source standards and, as a consequence, a production of an incompatible information exchange over the WEB. This paper proposes a structured analysis of Web-based solutions, trying to identify the most critical aspects to promote a unique 3D digital standard model capable of sharing product and manufacturing data more effectively-regardless of geographic boundaries, data structures, processes or computing environment. © 2008 Springer-Verlag London Limited.

Keywords: Collaborative design , Product lifecycle management , Virtual enterprise , Web3D

The purpose of the work is the realization of a composite material with long glass fibers having better characteristic than a fiber random composite, to permit the reduction of weight and costs to shipyards for pleasure craft. Structural optimization is performed by ANSYS for the choice of the layers disposition to obtain the maximum stiffness with minimum material employment, saving weight. The study is centered on the research of the better configurations of plies packing in relation of pure shear stress for four different plies. Unidirectional plies, both symmetric orthotropic and symmetric non-orthotropic ones, are realized successively by the vacuum bag technique. Experimental tests of traction, bending, inter laminar shear and pure shear are executed to characterize the three different type of material. Experimental results are compared to ones obtained numerically to validate the procedures; the comparison with the analytical results permitted to attribute an adequate value to shape factor of the fibers. In all the cases the optimization permitted the construction of much more resistant plies than random ones, with a lower thickness. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Keywords: Composite material test , Random composite , Structural optimization

Purpose - This paper aims at defining a structured process of continuous innovation in the product concept development phase by a statistical-based Kansei engineering (KE) approach. It consists in the identification of quality elements satisfying both functional and emotional user needs, i.e. the total quality elements. Design/methodology/approach - The approach is developed integrating results from Kano and KE analysis. Three statistical methods considered to be suitable for KE study, are used: supersaturated design for concept configuration, ordinal logistic regression for data analysis, and EVA method for quality evaluation of the optimal concept. These methods are compared with the most used ones in KE regarding their efficacy, efficiency and easiness of use. An innovative procedure to exhibit concepts in a KE session is also presented. It uses the abstraction and association idea principles to elicit users' grade of agreement for a particular Kansei word. Findings - The proposed approach is fully exploited through a case study on train interior design, developed in a virtual reality (VR) laboratory. The evaluation of comfort improvements obtained by means of a new handle and handrail design is carried on with expert users in VR. A consistent increase of a quality index, by using the defined approach, was obtained. Originality/value - This work aims at contributing to the conception of new product solutions, which are appealing and saleable. The availability of virtual reality technologies and software capable to manage complex statistical analyses, will concretely aid designers and engineers in the ideation of high-emotional-quality products, which can be helpful for innovative enterprises to maintain and even increase their market position. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Keywords: Customer satisfaction , Design and development , Product development , Total quality management

This paper presents a statistical methodology to improve the car packaging setup in the first phase of a new mini-car design. An original procedure for comfort assessment using virtual manikins is formulated. The Robust Design approach enables to identify the optimal level for the main design factors of the new car packaging. The optimal solution is the most insensitive to anthropometric variability. The case study of a new mini-car packaging setup is exploited. The experimental results in virtual environment are obtained using the virtual manikin Jack by UGS. On the base of adequate comfort indexes, the proposed methodology allows defining a car packaging which is, on average, more comfortable than that obtainable as initial setting by applying the Enhanced SAE Packaging Guidelines and the Posture Prediction algorithms proposed by the UMTRI (UMI-USA). © Springer Verlag France 2007.

Keywords: Human variability modelling , Robust design , Virtual ergonomics

In recent years the vehicle design field has followed a progressive evolution by focusing its main interest on passive and active safety levels. One of the most injurious cases for the safety of passengers is the crash between a car and a heavy vehicle (truck). Generally, in fact, when such an occurrence happens, the greatest damage is suffered by the passengers of the car. This is because of the considerable structural difference between the two vehicles and the lack of devices to reduce the injuries of the car passengers. In this work, as a consequence of the previous considerations, we deal with the design of a new protective system for heavy vehicles over 3.5 tons. The new rear underrun protective device presented here, compared to the traditional one, can dissipate a greater amount of energy; this reduces the damage suffered by the passengers of a car involved in an impact with a truck. To simulate the behaviour of the new protective device during different kinds of crashes, dynamic finite element method (FEM) analyses have been carried out. The comparison between the new protective system and the standard one has shown that the new designed protective system has better performances in terms of energy absorption and peaks of decelerations.

Keywords: Crash analyses , FEM , RUPD

The paper describes results of methodical activity performed by employing inventive principles of the theory for the inventive resolution of problems (TRIZ), in order to obtain concept of rear underrun protective device for an industrial vehicle. A screening with concepts proposed in previous papers is also performed.

Keywords: Conceptual design , TRIZ

This paper describes an approach to the keel design of a sailing yacht. The related software, which is fully automatic, leads to the optimal shape by modifying the surface used to define the keel planform. B-spline curves and surfaces have been used due to their ability in following complex shapes. The algorithm integrates ad hoc implemented original software with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) commercial ones. The optimisation procedure uses genetic algorithms (GAs) and a gradient-based optimiser for the refinement of the solution. A careful CAD and CFD modelling leads to a stable and efficient generalised method, which has been applied to the design of the centreboard of the 5o5 international class racing dinghy. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: CFD , Design optimisation , GAs , Sailing yacht

This research work regards the development of a new roadmap for complex products design based on an improved modular approach. The goal is to refine an existing method affected by some drawbacks into a to new product development paradigm, with the aim of reducing design times, mistakes and subjectivity. The best results came from integrating a set of diverse methodologies for product design and systematic innovation. The proposed design paradigm is based on an improved Modular-TRIZ-DSM approach, and the results obtained, in terms of modules definition and interfaces, have been evaluated. The most important results concern a better repeatability of design results and the capability to forecast technical evolution of a specific product family. After a short description of the methodologies of interest, the roadmap is described focusing on the differences from the traditional method. Copyright © 2008 by ASME.

This paper discusses aspects related to the implementation of Design Automation applications within Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) industrial context. It focuses the attention on some characteristics of the design process in SME context, and highlights issues of DA in relation to the characteristics previously evidenced. On this basis, it has been defined a methodology, named MEDEA (Methodology per Design Automation), to develop DA applications; it proposes a step by step roadmap and suggests methods and tools finalized to developers more skilled on products and design process than on IT technologies. Two industrial applications realized to evaluate the methodology are then presented. They are based on two different approaches: the first suitable to represent product structure and derived from Object Oriented programming and the second based on design process representation. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.

Keywords: Design automation , Knowledge representation , Knowledge-based engineering , PDM/PLM , SMEs