Daniel A. McAdams

A Computational Technique for Concept Generation

Few computational tools exist to assist designers during the conceptual phase of design, and design success is often heavily weighted on personal experience and innate ability. Many well-known methods (e.g. brainstorming, intrinsic and extrinsic searches, and morphological analysis) are designed to stimulate a designer’s creativity, but ultimately still rely heavily on individual bias and experience. Under the premise that quality designs comes from experienced designers, experience in the form of design knowledge is extracted from existing products and stored for reuse in a web-based repository. This paper presents an automated concept generation tool that utilizes the repository of existing design knowledge to generate and evaluate conceptual design variants. This tool is intended to augment traditional conceptual design phase activities and produce numerous feasible concepts early in the design process.Copyright

Nano/Micro‐Manufacturing of Bioinspired Materials: a Review of Methods to Mimic Natural Structures

Through billions of years of evolution and natural selection, biological systems have developed strategies to achieve advantageous unification between structure and bulk properties. The discovery of these fascinating properties and phenomena has triggered increasing interest in identifying characteristics of biological materials, through modern characterization and modeling techniques. In an effort to produce better engineered materials, scientists and engineers have developed new methods and approaches to construct artificial advanced materials that resemble natural architecture and function. A brief review of typical naturally occurring materials is presented here, with a focus on chemical composition, nano-structure, and architecture. The critical mechanisms underlying their properties are summarized, with a particular emphasis on the role of material architecture. A review of recent progress on the nano/micro-manufacturing of bio-inspired hybrid materials is then presented in detail. In this case, the focus is on nacre and bone-inspired structural materials, petals and gecko foot-inspired adhesive films, lotus and mosquito eye inspired superhydrophobic materials, brittlestar and Morpho butterfly-inspired photonic structured coatings. Finally, some applications, current challenges and future directions with regard to manufacturing bio-inspired hybrid materials are provided.

Function-based, biologically inspired concept generation

Abstract The natural world provides numerous cases for inspiration in engineering design. Biological organisms, phenomena, and strategies, which we refer to as biological systems, provide a rich set of analogies. These systems provide insight into sustainable and adaptable design and offer engineers billions of years of valuable experience, which can be used to inspire engineering innovation. This research presents a general method for functionally representing biological systems through systematic design techniques, leading to the conceptualization of biologically inspired engineering designs. Functional representation and abstraction techniques are used to translate biological systems into an engineering context. The goal is to make the biological information accessible to engineering designers who possess varying levels of biological knowledge but have a common understanding of engineering design. Creative or novel engineering designs may then be discovered through connections made between biology and engineering. To assist with making connections between the two domains concept generation techniques that use biological information, engineering knowledge, and automatic concept generation software are employed. Two concept generation approaches are presented that use a biological model to discover corresponding engineering components that mimic the biological system and use a repository of engineering and biological information to discover which biological components inspire functional solutions to fulfill engineering requirements. Discussion includes general guidelines for modeling biological systems at varying levels of fidelity, advantages, limitations, and applications of this research. The modeling methodology and the first approach for concept generation are illustrated by a continuous example of lichen.

A COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH TO CONCEPTUAL DESIGN

Design research has generated many computational tools to aid the designer over the years. Most of these tools are focused on either the preliminary steps of customer need gathering or the concluding steps of embodiment or detail design. The conceptual design phase has seen fewer computational tools even though well known methods are available such as brainstorming, intrinsic and extrinsic searches and morphological analysis. In this paper a generalized computational conceptual design tool is presented to aid designers at the conceptual design stage. It relies on storing and reusing existing design knowledge to create new concept variants. Concept variants are computed using matrix manipulations, essentially creating a mathematical morphological matrix. The concept generator produces quick concepts that can be used for concept selection or as a basis for generating additional concept variants through non-computational, creative techniques.Copyright

Exploring the Use of Functional Models in Biomimetic Conceptual Design

The biological world provides numerous cases for analogy and inspiration. From simple cases such as hook and latch attachments to articulated-wing flying vehicles, nature provides many sources for ideas. Though biological systems provide a wealth of elegant and ingenious approaches to problem solving, there are challenges that prevent designers from leveraging the full insight of the biological world into the designed world. This paper describes how those challenges can be overcome through functional analogy. Through the creation of a function-based repository, designers can find biomimetic solutions by searching the function for which a solution is needed. A biomimetic functionbased repository enables learning, practicing, and researching designers to fully leverage the elegance and insight of the biological world. In this paper, we present the initial efforts of functional modeling biological systems and then transferring the principles of the biological system to an engineered system. Four case studies are presented in this paper. These case studies include a biological solution to a problem found in nature and engineered solutions corresponding to the high-level functionality of the biological solution, i.e., a housefly’s winged flight and a flapping wing aircraft. The case studies show that unique creative engineered solutions can be generated through functional analogy with nature. DOI: 10.1115/1.2992062 The designs of the biological world allow organisms to survive in nearly all of earth’s challenging environments filling niches from under-sea volcanic vents, tundras both frozen and desolate, poisonous salt flats, and deserts rarely seeing rain. Nature’s designs are the most elegant, innovative, and robust solution principles and strategies allowing for life to survive many of the earth’s challenges. Biomimetic design aims to leverage the insight of the biological world into the engineered world, but because of numerous challenges, biomimetic design is still undeveloped as a method for formal concept generation. Allowing design engineers’ formal and full access to the solution principles and strategies of the biological world remains beyond current methods and knowledge. Many challenges prevent immediate adoption of designing via biological inspiration including 1 a lack of equivalent engineering technologies, 2 a knowledge gap between designers and biologists, and 3 unawareness of analogous biological systems. Significant effort and time are required to become a competent engineering designer, which creates an equally significant obstacle to becoming sufficiently knowledgeable about biological systems to effectively execute biomimetic design. Formal design based on functional modeling and concept generation methods 1–9 provides a unique opportunity to extend biomimetic design to meet the challenges thwarting the adoption into formal engineering design practices. The generation of functional models based on what a product must do instead of how it will be accomplished provides designers with many benefits such as explicit correlation with customer needs, comprehensive understanding of the design problem, enhanced creativity through abstraction, and innovative concept generation focused on answering what must be done 7,8. Design based on functional modeling provides designers with the freedom to consider the functionality of analogous biological systems without the burden of technological feasibility, and when applied with automated concept generation techniques based on predefined and expandable knowledge bases such as a design repository, biological systems may be explored without the need for advanced training in biological sciences. The representation of products by function has enabled the creation of design repositories allowing designers to access solution principles that are outside their personal knowledge or expertise 10–13. The ability of functional representation to allow designers to access such design information is a key impetus toward the extension of biomimetic design through the method of functional modeling. If biological inspiration requires designers to have extensive knowledge of biological systems, then the insight of the biological world will never be fully accessible to engineering design. The objectives of the research presented in this paper are to functionally explore biological systems to discover the knowledge needed to enable a function-based biomimetic design repository. First, a brief summary of previous work in biomimetic design is provided. Next, the research methodology that was followed to generate the case studies found in Sec. 4 of this paper is discussed. Finally, conclusions reached thus far in this research are discussed as well as a summary of the direction for future work to be completed.

Biologically Meaningful Keywords for Functional Terms of the Functional Basis

Biology is recognized as an excellent source of analogies and stimuli for engineering design. Previous work focused on the systematic identification of relevant biological analogies by searching for instances of functional keywords in biological information in natural-language format. This past work revealed that engineering keywords could not always be used to identify the most relevant biological analogies as the vocabularies between biology and engineering are sufficiently distinct. Therefore, a retrieval algorithm was developed to identify potential biologically meaningful keywords that are more effective in searching biological text than corresponding engineering keywords. In our current work, we applied and refined the retrieval algorithm to translate functional terms of the functional basis into biologically meaningful keywords. The functional basis is widely accepted as a standardized representation of engineering product functionality. Therefore, our keywords could serve as a thesaurus for engineers to find biological analogies relevant to their design problems. We also describe specific semantic relationships that can be used to identify biologically meaningful keywords in excerpts describing biological phenomena. These semantic relations were applied as criteria to identify the most useful biologically meaningful keywords. Through a preliminary validation experiment, we observed that different translators were able to apply the criteria to identify biologically meaningful keywords with a high degree of agreement to those identified by the authors. In addition, we describe how fourth-year undergraduate mechanical engineering students used the biologically meaningful keywords to develop concepts for their design projects. DOI: 10.1115/1.4003249

A Methodology for Model Selection in Engineering Design

Engineering design consists of a series of stages during which a number of decisions need to be made by the designer. Since the information available to the designer is limited during initial design stages, to make these decisions and be able to proceed further in the design process, the designer needs to depict the nature, visualize the form, and predict the behavior of the product through the use of aids called models. These models guide these decisions, therefore, the designer needs to ensure the downstream validity of these decisions by constructing models with sufficient accuracy and resolution. Because higher quality and accuracy of information is most often accompanied by a higher cost for a model, determining a satisfactory level of goodness for a model is a fundamental and pervasive question in engineering. Hence, a key aspect of design model construction is deciding whether a model is appropriate for a particular design specification or evaluation, considering accuracy and cost factors. This paper presents an approach for design model construction using utility theory. Since model selection is a design decision, uncertainties in parameters and models are considered by evaluating the confidence in the selection of any model. A method for proceeding in the reverse manner to determine the required goodness of a model is also discussed. We present this research through application to a race car sway bar.

TRANSLATING TERMS OF THE FUNCTIONAL BASIS INTO BIOLOGICALLY MEANINGFUL KEYWORDS

Biology has long been recognized as an excellent source of analogies and stimuli for engineering design. Previous work focused on the systematic identification of relevant biological analogies by searching for instances of functional keywords in biological information in natural language format. This past work revealed that engineering keywords couldn’t always be used to identify the most relevant biological analogies, as the vocabularies between biology and engineering are sufficiently distinct. Therefore, a method of identifying biologically meaningful keywords that correspond to engineering keywords was developed. Here, we apply and refine this method by generating biologically meaningful keywords for the terms of the Functional Basis, which is widely accepted as a standardized representation of the functionality of engineering products. We present insights gained on the selection of biologically meaningful keywords for the function sets based on semantic relations. We then observe the use of our keywords by providing 4th year undergraduate design students with the biologically meaningful keywords that are related to the desired functions of their design projects.Copyright

A Validation Study of an Automated Concept Generator Design Tool

The current version of the Concept Generator, an automated mathematically-based design tool, is studied in an effort to validate its general approach and establish research goals for further development. As part of the study, four undergraduate engineering researchers from the University of Missouri-Rolla and University of Texas at Austin execute a qualitative study of the software’s effectiveness at producing useful design solutions. The students engage in several activities designed to test the capabilities of this early version of the software. A report of their results and analyses identifies the benefits and disadvantages of the software (and underlying method) as viewed at this stage of development. Furthermore, the design solution data collected by the undergraduate researchers is analyzed more quantitatively during a post-study investigation. Both the qualitative and quantitative studies indicate that the Concept Generator is a promising first step toward the creation of an effective design tool for the conceptual phase of design. Furthermore, the student reports on their hands-on experiences with the software identify strengths and weaknesses of this early version of the Concept Generator and help establish many avenues for further development of the design tool.Copyright

An Engineering-to-Biology Thesaurus for Engineering Design

Engineering design is considered a creative field that involves many activities with the end goal of a new product that fulfills a purpose. Utilization of systematic methods or tools that aid in the design process is recognized as standard practice in industry and academia. The tools are used for a number of design activities (i.e., idea generation, concept generation, inspiration searches, functional modeling) and can span across engineering disciplines, the sciences (i.e., biology, chemistry) or a non-engineering domain (i.e., medicine), with an overall focus of encouraging creative engineering designs. Engineers, however, have struggled with utilizing the vast amount of biological information available from the natural world around them. Often it is because there is a knowledge gap or terminology is difficult, and the time needed to learn and understand the biology is not feasible. This paper presents an engineering-to-biology thesaurus that affords engineers, with limited biological background, a tool for leveraging nature’s ingenuity. The thesaurus aids in many steps of the design process and increases the probability of a creative, analogical design. Biological terms in the thesaurus are correlated to the engineering domain through pairing with a synonymous function or flow term of the Functional Basis lexicon, which supports functional modeling and abstract representation of any functioning system. The version of the thesaurus presented in this paper represents an integration of three independent research efforts, which include research from Oregon State University, the University of Toronto, and the Indian Institute of Science, and their industrial partners. The overall approach for term integration and the final results are presented. Applications to the areas of design inspiration, comprehension of biological information, functional modeling, creative design and concept generation are discussed.