Adaptation and implementation of a process of innovation and design within a SME

A design process is a sequence of design phases, starting with the design requirement and leading to a definition of one or several system architectures. For every design phase, various support tools and resolution methods are proposed in the literature. These tools are however very difficult to implement in an SME, which may often lack resources. In this article we propose a complete design process for new manufacturing techniques, based on creativity and knowledge re-use in searching for technical solutions. Conscious of the difficulties of appropriation in SME, for every phase of our design process we propose resolution tools which are adapted to the context of a small firm. Design knowledge has been capitalized in a knowledge base. The knowledge structuring we propose is based on functional logic and the design process too is based on the functional decomposition of the system, and integrates the simplification of the system architecture, from the early phases of the process. For this purpose, aggregation phases and embodiment are proposed and guided by heuristics

Innovation through pertinent patents research based on physical phenomena involved

One can find innovative solutions to complex industrial problems by looking for knowledge in patents. Traditional search using keywords in databases of patents has been widely used. Currently, different computational methods that limit human intervention have been developed. We aim to define a method to improve the search for relevant patents in order to solve industrial problems and specifically to deduce evolution opportunities. The non-automatic, semi-automatic, and automatic search methods use keywords. For a detailed keyword search, we propose as a basis the functional decomposition and the analysis of the physical phenomena involved in the achievement of the function to fulfill. The search for solutions to design a bi-phasic separator in deep offshore shows the method presented in this paper

Implementation of Augmented Reality in a Mechanical Engineering Training Context

Global industry is at the heart of its fourth industrial revolution, being driven by the emergence of new digital solutions: Augmented reality allows us to consider the evolution towards the “the augmented operator”. This technology is currently little used in higher education, especially for mechanical engineers. We believe that it can facilitate learning and develop autonomy. The objective of this work is to assess the relevance of augmented reality in this context, as well as its impact on learning. The difficulties for a student approaching a technical system are related to reading and understanding 2D and even 3D representations, lack of knowledge on components functions, and the analysis of the chain of power transmission and transformation of movement. The research is intended to see if AR technologies are relevant to answer these issues and help beginners get started. To that end, several AR scenarios have been developed on different mechanical systems, using the relevant features of the AR interfaces that we have identified. Otherwise, these experiences have enabled us to identify specific issues linked to the implementation of AR. Our choice of AR devices and software allows us to have an integrated digital chain with digital tools and files used by mechanical engineers. Finally, we sought to assess how this technology made it possible to overcome the difficulties of learners, in different learning situations

Qualification of rapid prototyping tools: proposition of a procedure and a test part

Rapid prototyping machines are becoming faster at manufacturing machine tools. The processes of quality assurance impose the qualification of the production devices. A procedure and a test part are proposed for that purpose; intended for the family of processes of point-by-point layer manufacturing. Existing test parts only permit benchmarking and comparisons between machines: their capacity can be evaluated, but the test part analysis does not make it possible to establish the link between noted defects and their causes. The proposed process and test part permit the identification of the defects and whether their origins are machine or material linked. This paper describes the approach used to design the test part. Some preliminary measures were made on a test part, in order to discuss procedure and measurements

Capitalizing and structuring design knowledge in an SME environment

Small companies can find it difficult to preserve their knowledge, and also to structure a design process. A design methodology is proposed, based on design knowledge reuse and suitable for developing new manufacturing processes in an SME context. This paper describes a knowledge structuring and capitalization method, where a functional description is applied. The purpose is to capitalize technical solutions and the components used to carry out a given function, and to build a knowledge base that could be reused when designing new manufacturing processes. In this way, the time spent on research into design concepts can be reduced. Components are identified using the Converter-Transmitter-Operator-Control classification, based on describing the functional flow path in terms of energy. Produced and induced effects associated with the components are highlighted, by identifying the relevant conjugate variables for the functional flows. The choice of solutions in the reuse phase is thus facilitated by considering these effects. In addition, a task decomposition tool has been developed to simplify the describing of existing manufacturing processes. Existing knowledge capitalization methods proved unsuitable for an SME context. Based on the proposed approach, we applied our capitalization method in an industrial context, with the processes used by our partner company, which had never previously capitalized its design knowledge

Augmented Reality experiment in higher education, for complex system appropriation in mechanical design

Virtual representations are quite widely used in higher education to visualize a design model or simulation. Nevertheless, many students have difficulty grasping mechanical systems, from a 2D design plan or a 3D CAD definition. This is why we implement real system manipulations, associated with various representations, especially for students with no technological skills. Augmented reality can provide an answer to the difficulty of making the link between a representation and the real system. Since augmented reality has not yet been used in mechanical design pedagogy, the challenge was to evaluate the relevance of this technology to facilitate understanding of mechanisms. An augmented reality scenario has been implemented on an electromechanical mechanism. It makes it possible to identify components and their locations, to explore the mechanism and thus more easily identify the kinematic chain or transmission power flow for example. Two different interfaces were used by the learners (tablet and HoloLens glasses), each of which has its advantages. The first experiment was conducted with students in engineering training, as well as bachelor of technology students. During analysis of mechanism practical session, half of the workforce used augmented reality, while the others had only paper documentation and cad. At the end of the session, an assessment of the system’s understanding was conducted ‘hot’ and shows improvements for augmented reality users. Here, augmented reality is used in pedagogy, as a new medium support to pedagogy. But this experience is also relevant for introducing engineering students to a relevant technology for industry of the future, enabling them to measure the potential of augmented reality

Formalisation préalable d'un problème de conception, pour l'aide à la décision en conception préliminaire

In the early phases of a traditional design process, many decisions are often made by designers. For that purpose, they take advantage of their experience and company knowledge. These decisions are necessary in a sequential design process but may hide many embodiment solutions. Moreover, designers often use a time consuming trial-and-error mode to find a working combination of standard elements. To overcome these difficulties, a decision support system based on constraint programming is proposed. The object of the design process set out in this work is to facilitate the embodiment design phase by avoiding a-priori decision making and searching for feasible architectures in which all the points of view of the various participants in the project are taken into account. The main stages are: the writing of the design problem into a Constraints Solving Problem (CSP) form, the exhaustive search for the feasible architectures, the exploitation and the reduction of the solutions space to help in the decision making. A preliminary analysis of the design problem is necessary. On one hand, it is essential to restrict the design problem to the only necessary and sufficient characteristics for the embodiment design phase, which we name structuring characteristics. On the other hand, it is necessary to express the design objectives and the qualification criteria of the design, in order to sort the embodiment solutions being obtained. An exhaustive four step method is detailed in this thesis. To determine the most interesting solutions, objectives and performance indicators are entered. Finally, the benefits of our approach are discussed.La conception architecturale est souvent réalisée grâce aux habitudes professionnelles et à l'expérience des concepteurs, qui leur permettent d'identifier les paramètres de conception pertinents à prendre en compte pour commencer l'étude et de faire les choix qu'impliquent une démarche séquentielle de détermination d'architecture. Ces décisions sont difficiles à prendre car les concepteurs ne disposent pas forcément d'éléments suffisants pour comparer les différentes alternatives. Ainsi, ils procèdent souvent par essai-erreur, jusqu'à l'obtention d'une configuration opérationnelle, mais qui n'est pas nécessairement optimale. Ces itérations sont, de plus, coûteuses en temps. Nous proposons un système d'aide à la décision en conception préliminaire, permettant de partir de plusieurs concepts de solution pertinents, pour arriver à une architecture validée et prédimensionnée en objectivant les choix de conception. Les grandes étapes sont: (i) l'écriture du problème de conception préliminaire sous forme de Problème par Satisfaction de Contraintes (PSC), (ii) la recherche exhaustive des architectures solutions, (iii) l'exploitation et la réduction de l'espace des solutions pour aider à la décision. C'est seulement ensuite qu'un choix est à faire parmi ces solutions, qui n'ont pas été arbitrairement restreintes par des choix initiaux. Les étapes (i) et (iii) nécessitent une analyse préalable du problème de conception. Il faut, d'une part, le limiter aux seules caractéristiques nécessaires et suffisantes pour la conception architecturale, que nous nommons caractéristiques structurantes. D'autre part, il faut exprimer les objectifs de conception et les critères de qualification de la conception, qui permettent de hiérarchiser les architectures-solutions obtenues et ainsi aider au choix final parmi elles. Nous proposons pour cela une démarche systématique d'analyse et structuration du problème de conception, basée sur quatre étapes, depuis l'analyse du besoin jusqu'à une approche physique, en passant par des approches fonctionnelle et organique du produit à concevoir. Des tableaux systématiques sont proposés. Notre approche est confrontée avec la démarche 'classique' d'un groupe de concepteurs, pour une même conception architecturale. L'utilisation du système d'aide à la décision permet une amélioration de la satisfaction des objectifs de conception, le choix du concept de solution le plus performant, l'obtention d'architectures-solutions valides et respectant toutes les contraintes énoncées. On dispose ainsi d'éléments dimensionnels pour poursuivre en conception détaillée sans subir les itérations engendrées par le processus essai-erreur

Design space exploration in embodiment design: an application to the design of aircraft air conditioners

The embodiment design of aeronautic systems proves to be a difficult design phase due to the variability in the system environment; the design is often constrained by atmospheric conditions. These atmospheric conditions appear to be highly variable according to the flight phases of the aircraft. The difficulty when designing air-conditioning systems for civil aircrafts is also inherent to the complexity of the coupling of the nonlinear physical phenomena inside of these systems (multi-physics, multi-scaling). Therefore, the design space appears to be very broad and quite difficult to explore. Embodiment design choices are relating to continuous and discrete design variables while the system effectiveness is extremely sensitive to most of these design variables. There is a lack of tools to support the investigation of the design exploration space and designer decisions at early stages of the design process. In this paper, a method is proposed to generate feasible embodiments and manage the compromise between various design requirements. A digital tool based on the meta-heuristic of Genetic Algorithms (Gas) has been developed to investigate the design problem. The selection of non-dominated solutions (Pareto) is used to identify relevant values for design variables and to facilitate choices among the design solutions of the air conditioning system.is an open access repository that collects the work of Arts et Métiers ParisTech researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in: https://sam.ensam.eu Handle ID: .http://hdl.handle.net/10985/15560 To cite this version : Dominique SCARAVETTI, Patrick SEBASTIAN-Design space exploration in embodiment design: an application to the design of aircraft air conditioner

A new method for extracting knowledge from patents to inspire designers during the problem-solving phase

Nowadays, patents are more than an industrial property protection,they constitute a considerable source of information. Several approaches deal with the extraction of pertinent information from patents, some of them translate that information into useful knowledge for problem-solving purposes. However, very few methods use a physical approach and a consistent analysis of the main function inthe problem definition phase. This paper proposes a new method to inspire designers with ideas and analogous solutions. The objective is to contribute to solve complex technical problems by exploiting knowledge found in patent documents. The method is divided into three sections: problem definition, research and analysis, and innovation.The first two sections use iteratively a knowledge base formed by pertinent keywords related to the problem context, physical keywords from functional decomposition and physical analysis, and technological keywords recovered through patent analysis. In the third section, interesting patents are classified in a structured discovery matrix from the physical phenomena involved which are crossed in accordance with the related techniques found. The method is supported by a physical effects database of energy conversion and by evolution trends of technical systems. A deep offshore biphasic separator illustrates the method

Adaptation et mise en place d'un processus d'innovation et de conception au sein d'une PME

Le contexte global de ce travail de recherche concerne la structuration de l'innovation technologique en PME, pour la définition de procédés de fabrication. Cela passe par la mise en place d'un processus de conception basé sur la réutilisation des connaissances, ainsi que sur la recherche de concepts nouveaux. La méthodologie de conception et la base de connaissances proposées sont destinées à devenir un outil d'aide à la conception et à la mise en place de nouveaux procédés de montage ou d'assemblage. Toutefois, faciliter l'application du processus de conception, il a été nécessaire d'identifier des heuristiques permettant d'accompagner le concepteur. Par ailleurs, les méthodes actuelles de capitalisation de connaissances sont difficilement accessibles aux petites entreprises, du fait de leur manque de ressources et de la complexité des outils. Ainsi, nous avons développé une méthodologie et des outils d'utilisation simple et rapide, accessibles à un personnel non spécialiste de la conception, de la capitalisation ou de l'innovation. La structuration de la connaissance est proposée autour d'une logique fonctionnelle. La démarche de conception est également basée sur la décomposition fonctionnelle du système et intègre la simplification de l'architecture de système dès les premières phases du processus. A cette fin, des phases d'agrégation puis d'agencement sont proposées et sont guidées par des heuristiques. La capitalisation de la connaissance a été réalisée dans la PME MARQUET & Cie. La conception d'une machine automatisée d'assemblage de chaussons, illustre le processus global et les outils proposés.The global context of this research work concerns the structuring of the technological innovation in SME, for the design of manufacturing processes. It passes by the implementation of a process of conception based on the re-use of the knowledge, as well as on the search for new concepts. The design methodology and the proposed knowledge base are intended to become a design tool for the implementation of new assembly processes. However, in order to facilitate the application of this process, it was necessary to identify heuristics to assist the designer. Besides, the current methods of knowledge capitalization are difficult to use in small firms, because of their lack of resources and the complexity of tools. Thus, we developed methodology and tools for a simple and fast use, accessible to a personal which is non-specialist in design, capitalization or innovation. The structuring of knowledge is proposed around a functional logic. The design methodology is also based on the functional decomposition of the system, and integrates the simplification of the architecture system, from the first phases of the process. For this purpose, phases of aggregation and embodiment are proposed and guided by heuristics. The knowledge capitalization was performed within the enterprise MARQUET & Cie. The design of an automatic assembly machine illustrate the whole process and the proposed tools.PARIS-Arts et Métiers (751132303) / SudocSudocFranceF