Development of a conceptual design tool for mechanism design

Engineering design can be seen as a problem solving process in which engineers and designers convert their thoughts and ideas into real-life designs satisfying market and customer needs. The conceptual design process is crucial in engineering product design since it determines fundamental design features with respect to design requirements. Any decisions made at this stage have a significant impact on later stages of design. However, connection between system functional requirements and selection of actual mechanical components in mechanism designs is severely lacking. With the purpose filling this gap and assisting engineers and designers to obtain in-depth understanding on commonly seen mechanisms and machine elements a database (MMET) was established and programmed containing detail information of these components including technical functional attributes, movement attributes, pictures/drawings and merit analysis. A conceptual design tool built on MMET was then developed aiming to help the user to explore a broad range of mechanical components regarding system requirements. The database and conceptual design tool were validated and improved through industrial case studies which suggest the addition of Function Means tree and Functional Analysis Diagram. The value of MMET and the new conceptual design tool are indicated via positive outcomes of case studies, asserting their capability of offering assistance in understanding engineering product functions and how these functions are achieved, enabling comparisons regarding same functional requirements and finally providing opportunities for conceptual design improvements based on a cyclic process containing detail functional analysis, function-means tree construction and design optimisation.Open Acces

A multi-objective approach for improving real-time audio peak reduction and speech clarity in a dental drill noise reduction device

Abstract Audio signals typically comprise several characteristics to be improved by signal processing and in practice, each of these characteristics has a unique relationship to the controllable system parameters. Quantifying these relationships in a multi‐objective (MO) approach will enable an improved system setup. This paper determines two novel objective functions of a complex audio signal for the real‐time simultaneous improvement of audio peak reduction and speech clarity in a dental drill noise reduction (DDNR) device. The influence of the DDNR system parameters on the outcome of peak reduction and speech clarity is determined by combining response surface methodology and a desirability function to enable MO optimisation. The results show an average improvement of nearly 30% over the original DDNR device performance. The approach described provides an effective means for addressing MO optimisation of other real‐time audio signal processing applications where the signal has similar peak reduction and speech clarity objectives to be processed, particularly where the physical outcome is not easy to evaluate in a virtual environment

Automated functional analysis of patents for producing design insight

Patent analysis is a popular topic of research. However, designers do not engage with patents in the early design stage, as patents are time-consuming to read and understand due to their intricate structure and the legal terminologies used. Manually produced graphical representations of patent working principles for improving designers’ awareness of prior art have been demonstrated in previous research. In this paper, an automated approach is presented, utilising Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify the invention working principle from the patent independent claims and produce a visualisation. The outcomes of this automated approach are compared with previous manually produced examples. The results indicate over 40% match between the automatic and manual approach, which is a good basis for further development. The comparison suggests that the automated approach works well for features and relationships that are expressed explicitly and consistently but begin to lose accuracy when applied to complex sentences. The comparison also suggests that the accuracy of the proposed automated approach can be improved by using a trained part-of-speech (POS) tagger, improved parsing grammar and an ontology

Preliminary study of end-effector compliance for reducing insertion force in automated fluid coupling for trains

Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) (contract RSSB 2675)

A bibliometric review of sustainable product design

Consideration of sustainability in product development is becoming increasingly important and encompasses many aspects of product design. In this study, a bibliometric review of recent sustainable product design publications using Web of Science and VOSViewer is carried out. The review indicates that the majority of publications concerning sustainable product design is oriented towards environmental science-led subject areas and production-led journals. Analysis of author keyword co-occurrences reveals that circular economy, life cycle assessment, sustainable management, and optimization are the most popular topics in sustainable product design research. The analysis also reveals that the researchers fail to link sustainability research to activities in product design, which leads to the lack of access to relevant research that can make products more sustainable. Building on the findings, the authors propose four future research directions that aim to guide researchers to better correlate sustainability with product design, namely: sustainability interpretation, integration, assessment and validation, and improvement

A novel visual interface to foster innovation in mechanical engineering and protect from patent infringement

One of the main time and money consuming tasks in the design of industrial devices and parts is the checking of possible patent infringements. Indeed, the great number of documents to be mined and the wide variety of technical language used to describe inventions are reasons why considerable amounts of time may be needed. On the other hand, the early detection of a possible patent conflict, in addition to reducing the risk of legal disputes, could stimulate a designers' creativity to overcome similarities in overlapping patents. For this reason, there are a lot of existing patent analysis systems, each with its own features and access modes. We have designed a visual interface providing an intuitive access to such systems, freeing the designers from the specific knowledge of querying languages and providing them with visual clues. We tested the interface on a framework aimed at representing mechanical engineering patents; the framework is based on a semantic database and provides patent conflict analysis for early-stage designs. The interface supports a visual query composition to obtain a list of potentially overlapping designs.Peer reviewe

Design for Invention: A framework for identifying emerging design-prior art conflict

The increasing complexity of patented mechanical designs means that their novelty and inventive steps increasingly rely on interacting geometric features and how they contribute to device functions. These features and interactions are normally incorporated in patents through clear patent claims. However patents can be difficult to interpret and understand for designers due to their legal terminologies. This suggests there is a need for greater awareness of relevant prior art amongst designers in terms of avoiding potential conflict. This paper presents a framework that helps designers obtain insight on relevant prior art and enables emerging design-prior art comparison. The framework mainly contains development of a patent graphical functional representation, a domain-specific ontology and a semantic database. The graphical representation presenting the functional reasoning of patents in terms of interacting geometric features. A domain-specific ontology enables knowledge sharing and conceptualisation, providing a standardised vocabulary for describing patented designs. By formulating patent data into a semantic database, commonality of working principles between an emerging design and prior art can be identified. This enables early identification of potential conflict and thereby could help designers steer their emerging designs away from protected solutions. A computer tool being developed based on this approach is also described

IL-2 Inhibition of Th17 Generation Rather Than Induction of Treg Cells Is Impaired in Primary Sjögren’s Syndrome Patients

ObjectiveTo investigate the role of IL-2 in the balance of Th17 and Tregs and elucidate the underlying mechanisms of enhanced Th17 differentiation in primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS) patients.MethodsThis study involved 31 pSS patients, 7 Sicca patients, and 31 healthy subjects. Th17 and Treg cells were determined by flow cytometry, and IL-17A was detected by immunohistochemistry. IL-2 and IL-6 levels were assessed by ELISA and qPCR. p-STAT5 and p-STAT3 in salivary glands (SGs) were evaluated by immunohistochemistry and flow cytometry. The binding of STAT5 and STAT3 to the Il17a gene locus was measured by chromatin immunoprecipitation.ResultsWe found that the percentage of Th17 cells was increased in the periphery and SG of pSS patients when compared with healthy subjects, but the Treg cells was unchanged. Meanwhile, the IL-2 level was reduced, and the IL-6 and IL-17A level was increased in the plasma of pSS patients. The ratio of IL-2 and IL-6 level was also decreased and IL-2 level was negatively correlated with the level of IL-17A. The expression of Il6 and Il17a mRNA was significantly increased, whereas Foxp3, Tgfb1, Tnfa, and Ifng mRNA were comparable. Furthermore, the level of STAT5 phosphorylation (p-STAT5) was reduced and p-STAT3 was enhanced in the SGs and in peripheral CD4+ T cells of pSS patients. In vitro IL-2 treatment-induced STAT5 competed with STAT3 binding in human Il17a locus, leading to decreased Th17 differentiation, which was associated with the reduced transcription activation marker H3K4me3.ConclusionOur findings demonstrated a Treg-independent upregulation of Th17 generation in pSS, which is likely due to a lack of IL-2-mediated suppression of Th17 differentiation. This study identified a novel mechanism of IL-2-mediated immune suppression in pSS

Design for invention: annotation of Functional Geometry Interaction for representing novel working principles

In some mechanical engineering devices the novelty or inventive step of a patented design relies heavily upon how geometric features contribute to device functions. Communicating the functional interactions between geometric features in existing patented designs may increase a designer’s awareness of the prior art and thereby avoid conflict with their emerging design. This paper shows how functional representations of geometry interactions can be developed from patent claims to produce novel semantic graphical and text annotations of patent drawings. The approach provides a quick and accurate means for the designer to understand the patent that is well suited to the designer’s natural way of understanding the device. Through several example application cases we show the application of a detailed representation of Functional Geometry Interactions that captures the working principle of familiar mechanical engineering devices described in patents. A computer tool that is being developed to assist the designer to understand prior art is also described