TEACHING TECHNICAL DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS IN PRODUCT REDESIGN PROCESSES USING THE FBS MODEL

Abstract

Establishment of technical design specifications for the redesign of technical systems, which are not derived from customers needs, relies heavily on designers intuition and experience. The very few methods proposed in the literature for the establishment of such technical design specifications hinders the learning process in conceptual design subjects. The objective of this article is to propose a structured method for identification of technical design specifications based on the function-behaviorstate (FBS) model applied on redesign tasks. The method is being taught to students on the course of methodical' design in order to develop their abilities on the identification of technical specifications without relying on previous knowledge on the system and relying more on detailed observation. This method is based on the observation and identification of the different states taken by the attributes of the entities conforming the system (i.e., flows-function carriers-environment). A small scale preliminary study was conducted in order to validate the initial performance of the proposed method. Eight groups made up of undergraduate mechanical engineering students with basic knowledge in conceptual design were instructed to identify technical design specifications. The redesign task was to create an automated solution for replacing the manual production process at small food manufacturing companies. Four groups of students had to establish the specifications using their experience while the other four groups had to use the proposed method. Initial results showed for the proposed method a 36% increase in the number of identified specifications

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