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Functional Trade-offs in the Mechanical Design of Integrated Products - Impact on Robustness and Optimisability

Part of: Robust Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Nökkvi S. Sigurdarson ,
Tobias Eifler  and
Martin Ebro
Nökkvi S. Sigurdarson*
Affiliation:
Technical University of Denmark (DTU); Novo Nordisk A/S
Tobias Eifler
Affiliation:
Technical University of Denmark (DTU);
Martin Ebro
Affiliation:
Novo Nordisk A/S
*
Contact: Sigurdarson, Nökkvi S, Danish Technical University (DTU), Department of Mechanical Engineering, Denmark, [email protected]

Abstract

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It is generally accepted in industry and academia that trade-offs between functional design objectives are an inevitable factor in the development of mechanical systems. These trade-offs can have a large influence on the achievable robustness and performance of the final design, with many products only functioning in narrow sweet-spots between different objectives. As a result, the design process of multi- functional products can be prolonged when designers concurrently attempt to find sweet-spots between a number of potentially interdependent trade-offs. This paper will show that designers only have six different approaches available when attempting to manage a trade-off while trying to ensure robustness and a sufficient performance. These fall within one of three categories; accept, optimise, or redesign. Selecting the wrong approach, can result in consequences downstream which can be difficult to predict, amongst others a lack of robustness to geometric variation, constrained performance, and long development lead time. This points to a substantial potential in the synthesis of design methods that support the identification and management of trade-offs in early product development.

Keywords

Robust designEmbodiment designOptimisationDesign trade-offs
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 3491 - 3500
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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