Embedded Sensors and Feedback Loops for Iterative Improvement in Design Synthesis for Additive Manufacturing

Design problems are complex and not well-defined in the early stages of projects. To gain an insight into these problems, designers envision a space of various alternative solutions and explore various performance trade-offs, often manually. To assist designers with rapidly generating and exploring a design space, researchers introduced the concept of design synthesis methods. These methods promote innovative thinking and provide solutions that can augment a designer’s abilities to solve problems. Recent advances in technology push the boundaries of design synthesis methods in various ways: a vast number of novel solutions can be generated using high-performance computing in a timely manner, complex geometries can be fabricated using additive manufacturing, and integrated sensors can provide feedback for the next design generation using the Internet of things (IoT). Therefore, new synthesis methods should be able to provide designs that improve over time based on the feedback they receive from the use of the products. To this end, the objective of this study is to demonstrate a design synthesis approach that, based on high-level design requirements gathered from sensor data, generates numerous alternative solutions targeted for additive manufacturing. To demonstrate this method, we present a case study of design iteration on a car chassis. First, we installed various sensors on the chassis and measured forces applied during various maneuvers. Second, we used these data to define a high-level engineering problem as a collection of design requirements and constraints. Third, using an ensemble of topology and beam-based optimization techniques, we created a number of novel solutions. Finally, we selected one of the design solutions and because of some manufacturability constraints we, 3D-printed a prototype for the next generation of design at one third scale. The results show that designs generated from the proposed method were up to 28% lighter than the existing design. This paper also presents various lessons learned to help engineers and designers with a better understanding of challenges applying new technologies in this research. INTRODUCTION In the current design of engineering products, designers, instead of exploring a space of various alternative solutions, often rely on previous designs to create the next generation of products. This process hinders design creativity and discourages designers to find innovative solutions [1]. This lack of out-ofthe-box thinking is one of the reasons that engineering products have a similar pattern to their design. For instance, a configuration study on twin-engine propeller-driven aircraft reported that the baseline design accounted for 66% of all configurations [2]. This limitation in designers’ creative thought by adhering to a pre-established set of ideas in the design process is known as design fixation [3]. Fixation leads to duplication of efforts and makes a design process difficult to adapt to new innovations in the field [4]. To reduce fixation and exploit inventive design, designers create a space of various alternative solutions and explore various performance trade-offs. To assist designers with rapidly generating a design space, researchers introduced the concept of design synthesis methods [5]. These methods promote innovative thinking and provide solutions that can augment a designer’s abilities to solve complex problems. These techniques have been tested by generating a number of novel yet feasible designs such as aircraft configurations [6], wheel rims and cooling fins [6], satellites [7], power trains [8], and gear boxes [9, 10]. One of the limitations of the current synthesis methods Proceedings of the ASME 2016 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2016 August 21-24, 2016, Charlotte, North Carolina