This manuscript explains the conceptual design of carbon fibre reinforced polymer composites portable fire extinguisher. In this project, the integration of theory of inventive problem solving ...(TRIZ), morphological chart and analytic network process (ANP) methods was applied to produce the concept designs. The current design of fire extinguisher possesses great difficulties to many users due to its weight and design. In this study, a new design was developed to replace the existing heavy and bulky fire extinguisher design. A preliminary steps were used in the design planning to construct a proper direction to create a new design product. Afterwards, the detailing of the engineering parameters was refined using the TRIZ contradiction matrix to provide inventive solutions for the product. The finalised inventive solution from TRIZ is later incorporated with the morphological chart along with ANP technique to systematically develop the final conceptual design of portable fire extinguisher. The results showed that Concept Design 1 scored the highest value and ranked first among the four designs proposed. Finally, challenges of the portable fire extinguisher design and the improving criteria in concurrent engineering were presented.
In recent years, the reliable, accurate, and timely estimate of product cost at the conceptual design stage can enhance the competitiveness of a casting part. Set‐based concurrent engineering has ...emerged as an efficient solution to overcome this limitation as it provides simultaneous design procedures to positively assist the designer in achieving the required customer values in a short time and low cost. Therefore, this study attempts to integrate the set‐based concurrent engineering methodology into the development of a cost modeling system for the metal casting process. The system architecture is comprised of a user interface, knowledge database, and CAD modeling system. A detailed working flow process of the developed cost modeling system has been proposed under the guidelines of set‐based concurrent engineering. Further, the proposed methodology is demonstrated and validated by employing a real‐time casting part that was manufactured using the sand casting process. The implementation of the system provided many tangible benefits to the collaborative company including a decrease in cost estimation time (∼50%) and part rejection rate (∼32.3%). Further, the developed cost modeling approach provided a cost estimate near the actual cost of the product (∼4% deviation). It truly proves the significance of the developed system for the practitioners who believe that accurate and timely estimates of product manufacturing cost at the design stage can enhance the competitiveness of a product.
The objective of photocatalytic CO2 reduction (PCR) is to achieve high selectivity for a single energy‐bearing product with high efficiency and stability. The bulk configuration usually determines ...charge carrier kinetics, whereas surface atomic arrangement defines the PCR thermodynamic pathway. Concurrent engineering of bulk and surface structures is therefore crucial for achieving the goal of PCR. Herein, an ultrastable and highly selective PCR using homogeneously doped BiOCl nanosheets synthesized via an inventive molten strategy is presented. With B2O3 as both the molten salt and doping precursor, this new doping approach ensures boron (B) doping from the surface into the bulk with dual functionalities. Bulk B doping mitigates strong excitonic effects confined in 2D BiOCl by significantly reducing exciton binding energies, whereas surface‐doped B atoms reconstruct the BiOCl surface by extracting lattice hydroxyl groups, resulting in intimate B‐oxygen vacancy (B‐OV) associates. These exclusive B‐OV associates enable spontaneous CO2 activation, suppress competitive hydrogen evolution and promote the proton‐coupled electron transfer step by stabilizing *COOH for selective CO generation. As a result, the homogeneous B‐doped BiOCl nanosheets exhibit 98% selectivity for CO2‐to‐CO reduction under visible light, with an impressive rate of 83.64 µmol g−1 h−1 and ultrastability for long‐term testing of 120 h.
An inventive molten strategy is used to synthesize homogeneously B‐doped BiOCl nanosheets. Bulk B mitigates the strong excitonic effect confined in 2D BiOCl, whereas surface B induces a reactive B‐OV associate for CO2 activation. The simultaneous tailoring of bulk excitons and surface defects enables ultrastable and highly selective CO2‐to‐CO photoreduction in pure water.
This paper focuses on the novel concurrent design for cellular structures consisting of multiple patches of material microstructures using a level set-based topological shape optimization method. The ...macro structure is featured with the configuration of a cluster of non-uniformly distributed patches, while each patch hosts a number of identical material microstructures. At macro scale, a discrete element density based approach is presented to generate an overall structural layout involving different groups of discrete element densities. At micro scale, each macro element is regarded as an individual microstructure with a discrete intermediate density. Hence, all the macro elements with the same discrete densities (volume fractions) are represented by a unique microstructure. The representative microstructures corresponding to different density groups are topologically optimized by incorporating the numerical homogenization approach into a parametric level set method. The multiscale concurrent designs are integrated into a uniform optimization procedure, so as to optimize both topologies for the macrostructure and its microstructures, as well as locations of the microstructures in the design space. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed method can substantially improve the structural performance with an affordable computation and manufacturing cost.
•We conceptualised a concurrent New Product Development (NPD) process using GERT.•We derived a method of modelling the information and communication complexities within the process.•The GERT model ...was successfully employed at two NPD firms.
This paper proposes a time-computing model using the Graphical Evaluation and Review Technique (GERT) to analyse concurrent New Product Development (NPD) processes. The research presented here differs from previous work carried out on concurrent engineering. First, we conceptualise a concurrent NPD process using the GERT scheduling technique and derive a method of modelling the information and communication complexities within the process. Second, we extend previous research carried out on concurrent engineering and incorporate it within our model. Finally, we present an alternative method of analysing concurrent NPD process for both researchers and project managers alike. The GERT model developed in this paper was successfully employed at two NPD firms located in Ireland and Iran.
Rework that occurs late in the product life cycle is dramatically more expensive than design work performed early in the cycle. However, shifting traditional design work earlier in the design process ...so as to avoid rework later is difficult. A number of product development practices that have been characterized as a shift from developing a single‐point design to developing a set of possible designs have proven effective at reducing development rework. This paper refines the definitions of such “set‐based” development practices, which are aimed at early development phases, and shows how they can be applied to the systems engineering process in order to reduce or eliminate the root causes of rework. Examples from the Wright Brothers, Toyota, and several other companies are presented.
Smart manufacturing, tailored by the 4th industrial revolution and forces like innovation, competition, and changing demands, lies behind the concurrent evolution (also known as co-evolution) of ...products, processes and production systems. Manufacturing companies need to adapt to ever-changing environments by simultaneously reforming and regenerating their product, process, and system models as well as goals and strategies to stay competitive. However, the ever-increasing complexity and ever-shortening lifecycles of product, process and system domains challenge manufacturing organization’s conventional approaches to analysing and formalizing models and processes as well as management, maintenance and simulation of product and system life cycles. The digital twin-based virtual factory (VF) concept, as an integrated simulation model of a factory including its subsystems, is promising for supporting manufacturing organizations in adapting to dynamic and complex environments. In this paper, we present the demonstration and evaluation of previously introduced digital twin-based VF concept to support modelling, simulation and evaluation of complex manufacturing systems while employing multi-user collaborative virtual reality (VR) learning/training scenarios. The concept is demonstrated and evaluated using two different wind turbine manufacturing cases, including a wind blade manufacturing plant and a nacelle assembly line. Thirteen industry experts who have diverse backgrounds and expertise were interviewed after their participation in a demonstration. We present the experts’ discussions and arguments to evaluate the DT-based VF concept based on four dimensions, namely, dynamic, open, cognitive, and holistic systems. The semi-structured conversational interview results show that the DT-based VF stands out by having the potential to support concurrent engineering by virtual collaboration. Moreover, DT-based VF is promising for decreasing physical builds and saving time by virtual prototyping (VP).
As a well-known engineering practice, concurrent engineering (CE) considers all elements involved in a product's life cycle from the early stages of product development, and emphasizes executing all ...design tasks simultaneously. As a result, there exist various complex design problems in CE, which usually have many design parameters or require different disciplinary knowledge to solve them. To address these problems and enable concurrent design, different methods have been developed. The original problem is usually divided into small subproblems so that each subproblem can be solved individually and simultaneously. However, good decomposition, optimization, and communication strategies among subproblems are still needed in the field of CE. This paper attempts to study and analyze cooperative co-evolution (CC) based design optimization in CE by employing a parallel CC framework. Furthermore, it aims to develop new concurrent design methods based on parallel CC to solve different kinds of CE problems. To achieve this goal, a new novelty-driven CC is developed for design problems with complex structures and a novel concurrent design method is presented for quasi-separable multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) problems. The efficacy of the new methods is studied on universal electric motor design problems and a general MDO problem, and compared to that of some existing methods. Additionally, this paper studies how the communication frequency among subpopulations affects the performance of the proposed methods. The optimal communication frequencies under different communication costs are reported as experimental results for both proposed methods on the test problems. Based on this paper, an effective self-adaptive method is proposed to be used in both optimization schemes, which is able to adapt the communication frequency during the optimization process.
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