Product Generation
· Products must be developed from concepts through concurrent development of form, material, and production methods. This process is driven by the functional decomposition discussed in Chap. 7.
· Form is bound by the geometric constraints and defined by the configuration of connected components.
· The development of most components and assemblies starts at their interfaces, or connections, since for the most part function occurs at the interfaces between components.
· Product development is an iterative loop that requires the development of new concepts, the decomposition of the product into subassemblies and components, the refinement of the product toward a final configuration, and the patching of features to help find a good product design
Concept Evaluation
· The feasibility of a concept is based on the design engineer's knowledge. Often it is necessary to augment this knowledge with the development of simple models.
· In order for a technology to be used in a product, it must be ready. Six measures of technology readiness can be applied.
· A go/no-go screening based on customers' requirements helps filter the concepts.
· The decision-matrix method provides means of comparing and evaluating concepts. The comparison is between each concept and a datum relative to the customers' requirements. The matrix gives insight into strong and weak areas of the concepts. The decision-matrix method can be used for subsystems of the original problem.
· The advanced decision matrix method leads to robust decisions by including the effects of uncertainty, incompleteness, and evolution in the decision-making process.
· Belief maps are a simple yet powerful way to evaluate alternatives and work to gain team consensus.
· Product safety implies concern for injury to humans and for damage to the device itself, other equipment, or the environment.
· Safety can be designed into a product, it can be added on, or the hazard can be warned against. The first of these is best.
· A hazard assessment is easy to accomplish and gives good guidance.
Understanding the Problem and the Development of Engineering Specifications
· Understanding the design problem is best accomplished through a technique called quality function deployment (QFD). This method transforms customers' requirements into targets for measurable engineering requirements.
· Important information to be developed at the beginning of the problem includes customers' requirements, competition benchmarks, and engineering specifications complete with measurable benchmarks.
· Time spent completing the QFD is more than recovered later in the design process.
· There are many customers for most design problems.
· Studying the competition during problem understanding gives valuable in-sight into market opportunities and reasonable targets.
