Hamed Farahani Manesh

A modular virtual reality system for engineering laboratory education

The globalization trend has affected the tertiary education sector, resulting in an increased flow of both students and academics across borders. Economic pressures on universities and the emergence of new technologies have spurred the creation of new systems in engineering education. The recent advances in computer graphics have exposed great potential in education at all levels. The Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising technology which aims to assist the students in the visualization of concepts and to provide immediate graphical feedback during the learning process. This article presents a modular interactive teaching package, called Virtual Learning System (VLS), which can be used by people with little prior computer experience. VLS provides a comprehensive and conductive yet dynamic and interactive environment that can be incorporated into various courses in the field of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. The evaluation of the learning process with the developed system has been done through laboratory reports, lab quizzes and questionnaires implemented with a tutorial monitoring application.

Virtual-reality-based information requirements analysis tool for CIM system implementation: a case study in die-casting industry

A virtual-reality-based information requirement analysis tool (VR–RA tool) has been developed for an existing methodology, in order to capture and represent the enterprise information requirements of computer integrated manufacturing (CIM). The present paper describes the operational aspects of the existing methodology in VR–RA and introduces the developed VR–RA tool, which can be used by system analysts for determination of information requirements. A virtual manufacturing environment for matching the physical and the information model domains is utilized to delineate the information system requirements of CIM implementation. A set of rules and a knowledge base is appended to the virtual environment to remove any inconsistency that could arise between the material and the information flows during the requirement analysis. An experimental case study has been carried out in a firm in the die-casting industry in order to demonstrate the features and the potential industrial application of the VR–RA tool outlined in the current paper.

Applications of Virtual Reality in Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems

The Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer system, which can save time, cut costs and help to improve the learning process in engineering laboratory education by interactive 3D simulation environments. This paper gives an overview on the VR applications in undergraduate engineering laboratory education and presents a VR system tool ‘Virtual CIM Laboratory’ (VCIMLAB), developed for laboratory training on Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) systems. The proposed VR system is a cost-effective and safe approach of teaching the operations of automated manufacturing systems, which deal primarily with the expensive and complex high technology industrial automation equipments. The VCIMLAB allows students to self-experience on these systems without the need to work on actual equipments in the laboratory.Copyright

An Approach to Information Requirements Analysis for Holonic Manufacturing Systems Development

This paper presets a methodology for representing a manufacturing System in order to help with the requirements analysis (RA) in Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) development. The proposed methodology can reduce the cost and time involved at this stage by producing precise and accurate plans, specification requirements, and a design for HMS information systems. The dynamic activities, working mechanism of each holon, and relationships among holons are modeled using the Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) with Multi Agent Systems (MAS) approach. An experimental case study has been carried out in a firm in the die casting industry in order to demonstrate the features and the potential industrial application of presented methodology.Copyright

Experimental Study of Transient Natural Convection in a Rectangular Porous Enclosure with Heated from Side

An experiment was conducted to study transient natural convection in a porous medium filling an enclosure heated from one side and cooled from the other. Two porous medias are considered consisting of 2 mm and 8mm spheres. The aspect ratio of the enclosure, H / L, was fixed at 0.67. The results indicate that heat transfer increases with porosity for the same Rayleigh number. The time needed to penetrate the porous medium from the hot isothermal wall to reach a steady state is reduced at lower porosities. The variation of Nusselt number with time has also been studied in this experiment.