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.

Product Development

Product Family

The definitions of product platform are plenty and since it is a fundamental term, the following definition is used at our division; “the use of a standard module set between different products is known as a platform”. Thereby, a platform is the set of standard components, manufacturing processes, and/or assembly steps that are common in a set of products. The overall aim with product family design is to reduce cost due to the commonality between the variants. However, there is always a trade-off between commonality and performance of individual family members.

According to Jose and Tollenaere, “today the methods for platform product development are not practical and future results can be obtained with an integral methodology using a practical design representation linked to an optimization methodology”. Thus, in the division of Machine of Design, efforts are made to present quantitative approaches where product family design are formulated as formal multi-objective optimization problems.

Rapid Prototyping

When conducting design on novel mechatronic products, it can be valuable to test and evaluate the performance and properties of the concepts throughout the design process by producing them as downscaled prototypes. This is especially true when the product is of unconventional design and the designer can get increased confidence of the proposed concept by testing it as a sub scaled version. Nonetheless, the process of realization of new concept should be done in a rapid fashion in order not to halt the design process and simultaneously increasing explicit knowledge about the concept.

Rapid Concept Realization Laboratory (CRL) at division of Machine Design provides the ability to physically build, test, and evaluate new concepts, such as industrial robots and UAVs.

Conceptual Analysis

Conceptual analysis is often considered to be the most important step in the design of a new product. For example, Pahl and Beitz state: “In the subsequent embodiment and detail design phases it is extremely difficult or impossible to correct fundamental shortcomings of the solution principle. A lasting and successful solution is more likely to spring from the choice of the most appropriate principle than from concentration on technical detail”.

An important step in the conceptual design phase is the synthesis of principle solutions into many concepts. New methods and tools are being developed, at the division of Machine Design, which enable efficient and rapid concept generation and evaluation.

Virtual Testing

Physical product testing normally demands a significant amount of resources. A common approach within the industry is to extend the use of modeling and simulation (M&S), enabling a subset of the physical testing activities to be replaced by Virtual Testing. To succeed in this, a necessary condition is to utilize a methodology for model requirements management, development, and validation, carefully designed to handle aspects related to the ever increasing complexity of the simulation models as well as the challenges related to integration of one model in several different applications.

In the division of Machine Design, new methods are being developed which enable validation of complex simulation models, involving uncertainty assessments. The aim is to further enhance the ability to take early model-based design decisions, as well as enhancing the ability to use M&S as a support in certification of aircraft systems – an approach known as Virtual Certification.

Page responsible: peter.hallberg@liu.se
Last updated: 2011-11-03