Conceptual robustness in simultaneous engineering: An extension of Taguchi's parameter design

Simultaneous engineering processes involve multifunctional teams; team members simultaneously make decisions about many parts of the product-production system and aspects of the product life cycle. This paper argues that such simultaneous distributed decisions should be based on communications about sets of possibilities rather than single solutions. By extending Taguchi's parameter design concepts, we develop a robust and distributed decision-making procedure based on such communications. The procedure shows how a member of a design team can make appropriate decisions based on incomplete information from the other members of the team. More specifically, it (1) treats variations among the designs considered by other members of the design team as conceptual noise; (2) shows how to incorporate such noises into decisions that are robust against these variations; (3) describes a method for using the same data to provide preference information back to the other team members; and (4) provides a procedure for determining whether to release the conceptually robust design or to wait for further decisions by others. The method is demonstrated by part of a distributed design process for a rotary CNC milling machine. While Taguchi's approach is used as a starting point because it is widely known, these results can be generalized to use other robust decision techniques.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45879/1/163_2005_Article_BF01608400.pd

Thermal and mechanical properties of chitosan nanocomposites with cellulose modified in ionic liquids

In this paper, ionic liquid treatment was applied to produce nanometric cellulose particles of two polymorphic forms. A complex characterization of nanofillers including wide-angle X-ray scattering, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and particle size determination was performed. The evaluated ionic liquid treatment was effective in terms of nanocrystalline cellulose production, leaving chemical and supermolecular structure of the materials intact. However, nanocrystalline cellulose II was found to be more prone to ionic liquid hydrolysis leading to formation larger amount of small particles. Each nanocrystalline cellulose was subsequently mixed with a solution of chitosan, so that composite films containing 1, 3, and 5% mass/mass of nanometric filler were obtained. Reference samples of chitosan and chitosan with micrometric celluloses were also solvent casted. Thermal, mechanical, and morphological properties of films were tested and correlated with properties of filler used. The results of both, tensile tests and thermogravimetric analysis showed a significant discrepancy between composites filled with nanocrystalline cellulose I and nanocrystalline cellulose II