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A reliability-based design framework for early stages of design process

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Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The traditional decision-making process during early design stages deals with deterministically evaluating the design candidates in accordance with concrete objectives by assuming optimal or nominal design performance values for the candidates. However, this may increase subjectivity in the decision process since the design knowledge during early design is usually imprecise and incomplete, and mostly needs to be iteratively updated throughout product design development. To diminish the subjectivity, the knowledge of the design requirements can be precisely and accurately represented by means of probabilistic constraints that describe the uncertainties in the design requirements; therefore, in this work, a systematic design framework supported by reliability analysis is developed in such a way that it is able to provide an effective connection among the early design steps especially both at system level and component level. Thus, the probability of failures of the design candidates and their sub-solutions are investigated, based on design constraints with Gaussian distributions, or lower and upper bounds, by utilizing Monte Carlo method. To illustrate the potential applicability and efficacy of the proposed framework, a two-finger gripper design problem is considered. The results clearly demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective to achieve reliable design solutions that have uncertain quantitative characteristics to be used further in probabilistic structural analysis during the next design stages such as embodiment and detail design stages.

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Abbreviations

C(·):

Capacity function

D(·):

Demand function

DP:

Design parameter

FCC(θ):

Uncertain function-level capacity constraint

FDC :

Deterministic function-level demand constraint

FDC(θ):

Uncertain function-level demand constraint

g(·):

Limit-state function

OWV :

Overall weighted value

P(·):

Probability

P f :

Probability of failure

R :

Reliability

R P :

Reliability of a parallel system

R S :

Reliability of a series system

SF:

Sub-function

SRQ:

System-level requirements

SS:

Sub-solution

SV:

Solution variant

TCC :

Deterministic top-level capacity constraints

TCC(θ):

Uncertain top-level capacity constraint

TDC :

Deterministic top-level demand constraint

W DP :

Relative importance weight of a design parameter

WRss :

Weighted reliability of a sub-solution

WRsv :

Weighted reliability of a solution variant

Xi min :

Minimum requirement value for ith sub-function

Xi max :

Maximum requirement value for ith sub-function

Xs min :

Minimum system requirement value

Xs max :

Maximum system requirement value

µ i :

Mean value of a system requirement for ith sub-function

σ i :

Standard deviation value of a system requirement for ith sub-function

µ s :

Mean value of a system requirement

σ s :

Standard deviation value of a system requirement

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), under the BIDEP 2219-International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Programme.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Karamanoglu Mehmetbey University, Karaman, Yunus Emre Yerleskesi, 70100, Karaman, Turkey

    Murat Mayda

  2. The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Seung-Kyum Choi

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  1. Murat Mayda
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Correspondence to Murat Mayda.

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Technical Editor: Fernando Antonio Forcellini.

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Mayda, M., Choi, SK. A reliability-based design framework for early stages of design process. J Braz. Soc. Mech. Sci. Eng. 39, 2105–2120 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40430-017-0731-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40430-017-0731-y

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