Research Area

Machine design is a wide and inherently multidisciplinary area. The research at this division is directed towards formal methods for systems engineering and design, product development methods, industrial design and optimization design methods. The philosophy is to develop design methods which utilize state of the art modeling methods in order to design complex and multidisciplinary products. Click on the bellow buttons to further explore our research areas. Click here to view the connection between our research fields and our applied applications.

Applications

Aircraft

Research on a novel, multidisciplinary and holistic design framework for early aircraft design phase is currently being conducted at the divisions of Machine Design. The motivation is to produce an alternative design approach to more statistical based methods. The major disadvantage of these  approaches is the inability to evauate designs falling out of the methods validity range. In the field of aircraft design, as with other complex products, automatic geometry generation represents a prerequisite to achieve a geometry-in-the-loop multidisciplinary design optimization.

More Electric Aircraft (MEA)

Nowadays, the growth in air traffic, poses the question of how to achieve a more sustainable way of flying with a reduced amount of environmental damages and especially costs. One of the options to attain the lower cost flight is to utilize of the electric power to power the non-propulsive aircraft system. Implementing the more electric technology in new aircraft which is called More electric aircraft (MEA) achieves several advantage such as reducing the operation and maintenance cost and optimizing the performance.  

The division of Machine Design has initiated a project to identify a preliminary system concept for an energy-optimized MEA architecture for future aircraft, where new requirements and abilities associated with the MEA technology is defined and applied in the system architecture. This research is conducted in a funded project, FoT10-12, (Energy Optimized power supply based on MEA-technology) which is supported by Swedish Defense Materiel Administration (FMV) and SAAB.

MAV

Micro or Mini Air Vehicles (MAV) can generally be defined as small unmanned flying aircraft that can be operated and carried by one person. They are used to gather information using some sort of sensor, and can be either remotely piloted or autonomous. MAV sensors are most commonly video cameras, but could just as well be chemical, biological, acoustic or electromagnetic sensors. MAVs are characterized by being simple and inexpensive to build, and due to their small size, it is very important they are carefully optimized. MAVs are also likely to be built in relatively small series and be tailored for the sensors and equipment available at the time of deployment.

At the division of Machine Design, a distributed design optimization framework has been developed to automate the design of MAVs]. The framework includes selection of components from a database of propulsion system equipment and geometrical shape optimization. It links together a CAD system, responsible for the aircraft shape generation, with a panel code for aerodynamic evaluations.

Industrial Robot

Industrial robots or manipulators are according to the International Organization for Standardization “automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes”. Design of an industrial robot is a very complex process involving tremendous modeling and simulation efforts. We believe that a holistic and multidisciplinary design optimization approach is required to efficiently design future industrial robots.

The Division of Machine Design has more than ten years research experience regarding serial maniplulators design, in collaboraton with ABB, a leading supplier of industrial robots.

Sidansvarig: peter.hallberg@liu.se
Senast uppdaterad: 2012-12-23