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This study analyzed the functional design by investigating the distribution of clothing pressure of cycling knee brace using a three-dimensional virtual clothing program. Based on the average body size of Korean men in their 40 s, clothing pressure in wearing and cycling condition were collected on five knee brace products. According to the results, bonding fabric products had a high possibility of increasing inconvenience, as they had a higher clothing pressure at all measurement points and soared in motion application. It could be adjusted differently depending on the location by mixing materials or using details, so the design with thick pile fabric or velcro strap fastening added more pressure to the lower part of the knee. The length and circumference size also affected the clothing pressure. The design with tight upper and lower circumference pressured excessively the legs and rolled up and clumped together, while the one with loose lower circumference lacked the sufficient strength to support the knees. Also, the design with a curved outline due to the difference in the length of the front and back, increased the clothing pressure on the lower thigh or the upper calf. Therefore, the functional design of cycling knee braces requires comprehensive consideration of material thickness and structure, detailed size of length and circumference, fastening details, to reduce the pressure at the center and top of the knee and to support the lower part with proper pressure, as reflecting the pressure on the body location that come into contact during the motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By introducing functional groups such as quaternary amine groups, sulfonic acid groups, triazine groups, and other mespore nanomaterials into the hydrogel, better separation effect of some organic framework materials has been obtained. Due to a reasonable design and preparation strategy, the hydrogel composite-modified silica can be used in the selective separation of various analytes such as pesticides, alkylbenzenes, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, nucleosides/bases, benzoic acids, antibiotics, and carbohydrates. Through the exploration of chromatographic retention behavior, it is proved that the column can be used in mixed-mode liquid chromatography. The intra-day relative standard deviation for retention time of this new stationary phase is 0.12–0.16% (n = 10), and the inter-day relative standard deviation is less than 0.39% (n = 5). This new stationary phase can also be used for separation in complex samples. The limit of detection (LOD) for chlorotoluron in farm irrigation water is 0.21 µg/L and the linear range is 2–250 µg/L. After optimizing the chromatographic conditions, the highest efficiency of the hydrogel column in RPLC and HILIC modes has reached 32,400 plates/m (chlorobenzuron) and 41,300 plates/m (galactose). This new type of hydrogel composite is a porous network material with flexible functional design and simple preparation method and its application has been expanded in liquid chromatography separation successfully. The hydrogel composed of triallyl cyanate cross-linking agent and 3-(2-(methacryloyloxy) ethyl) dimethylamine) propane-1-sulfonate (SBMA) monomer which were co-modified on the surface of mesoporous silica with MOF-919 for separation in mixed-mode liquid chromatography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The functional design of a motorcycle rear suspension has become a complex process which involves different engineering disciplines such as computer aided design, structural analysis or multibody simulations. As a consequence of this multidiciplinarity, its development process is surrounded by multiple inter-related aspects and uncertainties which can compromise the feasibility of the solutions and hence making it difficult to foresees a priori the most appropriated design directions. This paper proposes an integrated methodology that supports early stage design decision-making for motorcycle rear suspensions by providing a rapid generative mechanism of feasible solutions with performance feedback for multiple requirements. The proposed framework integrates an object-oriented representation of the rear suspension with an adaptative design space approach for enhancing the capability to generate a variety of feasible solutions. A generative system coupled with the NSGA-II algorithm is proposed as responsible for exploring and managing the optimal functional design. The workflow has been structured in such a way all the design actions are conducted automatically. A case study of a Premoto3 rear suspension design is included in order to illustrated the effectiveness of the presented framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women prefer to wear a sports bra not only for exercising, but also during resting and daily activities, highlighting deficiencies in current sports bra designs. The purpose of this study was to design, develop, and evaluate a sports bra that offers responsive behavior, in terms of breast support and comfort, both during rest and running conditions. A biomimetic design framework guided the conceptual phase, and moisture responsive plant biomechanics offered a feasible functional model. Fourteen sports bras were developed and wear- tested using college athletes. The moisture responsive panels inside the bra absorbed the sweat generated during running, making the fabric thicker when wet (statistically significant via 3D body scanning results), while maintaining comfort and perceived breast support through sweaty conditions (confirmed via questionnaire results). Adjustments to the underbust band tightness should be pursued, aiming to further improve sports bra functionality, promoting women health and their lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In model-based engineering of embedded systems, manual validation activities such as reviews and inspections are needed to ensure that the system under development satisfies the stakeholder intentions. During the engineering process, changes in the stakeholder intentions typically trigger revisions of already developed and documented engineering artifacts including requirements and design specifications. In practice, changes in stakeholder intentions are often not immediately perceived and not properly documented. Moreover, they are quite often not consistently incorporated into all relevant engineering artifacts. In industry, typically manual reviews are executed to ensure that the relevant stakeholder intentions are adequately considered in the engineering artifacts. In this article, we introduce a dedicated review model to aid the reviewer in conducting manual reviews of behavioral requirements and functional design specification—two core artifacts in function-centered engineering of embedded software. To investigate whether the proposed solution is beneficial we conducted controlled experiments showing that the use of the dedicated review model can significantly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of manual reviews. Additionally, the use of the dedicated review model leads to significantly more confident decisions of the reviewers and is perceived by the reviewers as significantly more supportive compared with reviews without the dedicated review model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research contributes to the ongoing effort toward predicting and improving reliability in early engineering design, specifically during conceptual design. Increasing the rigor of predicting reliability during early design allows the designer to improve the decision-making process. Current reliability prediction methods cannot accurately capture uncertainty during conceptual design. The uncertainty of reliability predictions in early design can be significant, and, as a result, must be utilized in decision-making. To address these limitations, this paper presents the early design reliability prediction method (EDRPM) to calculate function and component failure rate distributions, which capture the parameter uncertainty. If required, these distributions can be converted into reliability values. A new technique, Frequency Weighting, is developed and applied to a Hierarchical Bayesian model to account for the number of times that a component has historically solved a function. This addition is necessary to accurately model the structure of the function-to-component relationship for capturing uncertainty. A case study using the advanced diagnostics and prognostic testbed electrical power system is presented to show the usefulness of EDRPM in facilitating decision-making during conceptual design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outdoor brands often use streamlined cutting lines to design high-performance outdoor pants. Inappropriate design lines combined with the accompanying sewing lines can cause discomfort or even restrict body movement. To reduce such discomfort, we need to find the appropriate location for cutting lines that do not interfere with body movement. In this research, we conducted ergonomic mapping of skin deformation in dynamic postures to provide fundamental data for selecting functional design lines of pants that will not hinder various movements. To analyze the lower body skin deformation depending on the posture, we marked dots at 3 cm intervals on the leg. We then measured the change in length between the points for three different postures using a three-dimensional scanner and the Rapidform program. The results were shown as a skin deformation map; this is expected to be used as reference data for the functional design lines of streamlined outdoor pants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptual design is an early stage in the product design process, which has an essential effect on the product innovation. Existing approaches for conceptual design always focus on the mapping processes, such as function-behavior-structure, function-behavior-state, or function-effect-solution, etc. The function, effect, solution, behavior, structure, and state all have influential factors in the above mapping processes. The enlargement of functional space, effect space, solution space, behavior space, structure space, state space, and problem-solving space can bring more opportunities to product innovation. This paper is devoted to functional space exploration in conceptual design. Each function has its own hierarchies and configurations, as well as each effect has its own multivariate influential factors, both of which can provide tremendous and exploitable space of creative concepts. The problem-solving space will be enlarged through the functional space exploration, which can obviously bring more opportunities for product innovation. This paper is devoted to presenting a systematic approach based on the reasoning of functional space exploration to increase opportunities for product innovation in conceptual design. A process of functional space exploration is treated as a three-step process, first transforming original function to derivative functions, then mapping these derivative functions to effects, and finally exploiting these effects to quantitative or qualitative physical quantity space. The functional design of new devices for decreasing resistance of amphibious vehicles is given as an example, which demonstrates that the methodology is obviously helpful to increase opportunities for product innovation in conceptual design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a genetic algorithm-based approach for automatic functional design of mechanical systems. The proposed method automatically finds a set of optimal or near-optimal design solutions with respect to desired functional requirements stored in a pre-built device database. Although, typically, the design solution space of a given mechanical system is very large, the proposed strategy can generate high-quality design solutions in a timely manner. The method considers life cycle cost (LCC) factors as one of the design optimization criteria, since LCC factors have an important impact on product competency in the current market. Fuzzy logic is used to transform linguistic design requirements into numerical values. A case study is presented to illustrate the operation of the genetic algorithm-based functional design method and the efficiency of the method for optimizing the final design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a graph and matrix representation scheme for the functional design of mechanical products, which provides a good basis to generate an explicit and comprehensive functional model used for functional reasoning. Three key features of the scheme are (1) The representation of the causal way behaviors are interconnected; (2) The representation of two types of functional relations:decomposed intoandsupported by; and (3) Support for diverse functional reasoning paths: three alternative B-FES/e paths are currently available. The scheme can guide functional design of mechanical products through functional reasoning steps including functional supportive synthesis, causal behavioral reasoning and functional decomposition. The developed functional model and its representation applied in a knowledge-based design environment can speed up the functional design process by automating functional reasoning steps. The proposed approach has been evaluated with a functional design example of a terminal cutoff unit in an automatic assembly system for manufacturing electronic connectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering design focuses on the development of products and artefacts to satisfy the specified function. Although considerable advances have been made over the last two decades in functional modelling, there is not very much progress on commercial Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems that really aid the designer in converting functional specifications to concept variants. Based on our previous work on Behaviour-driven Function-Environment-Structure (B-FES) modelling framework, this paper presents a functional design software system, called "FuncDesigner", to support the functional design of mechanical products through functional reasoning steps, including causal behavioural reasoning and functional decomposition. A function object library and a behaviour object library have been developed as well to serve as the knowledge base for the computerised functional modelling environment. The proposed functional design software system has been evaluated with a design example of a terminal insertion unit in an automatic assembly system for manufacturing electronic connectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a knowledge-based system, ‘EFDEX’, the Engineering Functional Design Expert, which was developed using an expert system shell, CLIPS 6.1, to perform intelligent functional design of engineering systems. On the basis of a flexible, causal and hierarchical functional modeling framework, we propose a knowledge-based functional reasoning methodology. By using this intelligent functional reasoning strategy, physical behavior can be reasoned out from a desired function or desired behavior, and inter-connection of these behaviors is possible when there is compatibility between the functional output of one and the corresponding functional requirement (e.g. driving input) of the next one. In addition, a complicated, desired function which cannot be matched with the functional output of any behavior after searching the object-oriented behavior base, will be automatically decomposed into less complex sub-functions by means of relevant function decomposition rules. An intelligent system for the functional design of an automatic assembly system provides an application of this intelligent design environment, and a demonstration of its methodology. In this paper, a knowledge-based functional representation scheme which integrates two popular AI representation techniques (object-oriented representation and rule-based representation) is also proposed as a prelude to a knowledge-based functional design system [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conceptual stage of mechanical product design has been recognised as the most critical product development stage. This is an area which is not addressed by current CAD systems. In this paper, we present our work on the abstraction and exploration of functional design information to support this design area. We consider the exploration of relevant functional design information as an important aspect of design work during this design process. Four aspects of functional design information are abstracted, including function, behaviour, structure and working environment. The working environment information is demonstrated as being useful to the exploration of functional design solutions. The physical behaviour is represented by an input-output flow-of-action, contrary to the commonly-used input-output flow-of-object approach (where object refers to material, energy or signal). Not only is this approach more generic, more importantly, we argue that the input-output flow-of-object is only a physical-level design abstraction, while flow-of-action is a functional-level design abstraction, hence it can capture design intention. Based on this strategy, we explore functional design information by considering the relevant action flows between the design and its working environment, as well as between the different components of the design, including their attributes, attribute expressions, constraints, and so on. Prototype software has been developed to implement the proposed approaches. A simple design example is used to illustrate the various aspects of functional design information and their exploration process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to use digital medical technology to develop and design an auxiliary diagnosis system for schizophrenia to assist doctors at all levels to diagnose and predict the cure of patients, improve the accuracy of diagnosis of symptoms, find complications in advance, and reduce the risk of disease, the application of Bayesian network in auxiliary diagnosis system of schizophrenia is studied, and an auxiliary diagnosis system of schizophrenia is designed. Based on data mining technology, knowledge information can be found from patient data and used to diagnose the nature of patients. The demand analysis of auxiliary diagnosis system is briefly introduced, and an auxiliary diagnosis system for schizophrenia based on Bayesian network is designed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]