AN APPROACH FOR MORE EFFICIENT VARIANT DESIGN PROCESSES
Year: 2011
Editor: Culley, S.J.; Hicks, B.J.; McAloone, T.C.; Howard, T.J. & Lindemann, U.
Author: Schubert, Sebastian; Feldhusen, Jörg; Nagarajah, Arun
Series: ICED
Section: Product and Systems Design
Page(s): 157-166
Abstract
Today, as a result of a steadily increasing pressure to reduce costs in the automotive supply industry, the majority of the products are designed by adapting already existing products. In the embodiment design phase, CAD models are taken as the design base and adapted. Changes made over generations of product variants make the models more and more complex and unstructured, causing more effort for adaptation. Further capability to reduce costs is found in the design process. Mandatory analyses, like the FMEA, are redone completely, although the product remains similar. In order to reduce the effort, standardized system elements are introduced into the FMEA being adapted to the new requirements of a new order. Furthermore, functions and parameters being elaborated by executing the FMEA are reused in the embodiment design phase. The approach presented here shows how function structures and parameters derived from the FMEA are used to manipulate a skeleton model in the CAD environment. The skeleton model provides the main constraints for the part design. A method is presented how the embodiment design of those products is simplified using parametric and direct modeling techniques.