Functional analysis of systems is a common engineering application during different stages of design. Conceptual designers as well as post-development designers use the process to gather useful information about the system that is under consideration. The functional basis and component taxonomy are collective approaches to describe these systems in unique languages. Since many designers naturally think in terms of physical components, it is more difficult for them to grasp fundamental concepts necessary to functionally model a system properly. A new design instrument, component functional templates, has been developed as a means to link the functional basis and component taxonomy together in one coherent visual form that can be used by novice designers as an invaluable skill-building tool. Principal components analysis (PCA) is used to extract historical data from many consumer products whose design information has been stored in an online repository produced by the UMR Design Engineering Lab. This paper presents the approach and derivation of the templates, along with valid examples of template groupings that result from the analysis. An application of the templates is presented in a case study on the drive train of a bicycle where the templates prove to sufficiently begin the modeling process and provide room for unique manipulation that accurately describes functional requirements of the subsystem.

Component functional templates are a foundational tool, for the functional modeling method, that novice users can implement to develop functional modeling skills and produce better results by not requiring the modeler to have extensive background knowledge in the method. The templates provide common function layouts of ordinary electromechanical components that are based on historic data collected from design information on a wide range of consumer products. A previous experiment has been performed on a sophomore level design class to assess the change in quality between functional modeling results with and without the use of component functional templates. To address further evaluation of the usefulness the templates, another experiment was performed on multiple sections of an undergraduate engineering design course, controlling the amount of time that the students are exposed to the templates, in order to eliminate any extended exposure biases in the models using the templates. Quality and accuracy of the resulting models were gauged using a metric consisting of function structure, number of functions, flow representation through a chain, and product representation (the same metric used in the previous experiment). The results show that the students using the component functional templates consistently made fewer mistakes in their models in all categories than those that did not use them and thus, produced better models in terms of quality and accuracy.

Functional modeling is an essential part of engineering design education. At the University of Missouri-Rolla, functional modeling is taught in an introductory engineering design course, required of every freshman-engineering student, and is exhibited through some graduate student level courses as well. In these courses, often an active learning reverse engineering experimentation is used to introduce the students to functional modeling. They are required to hypothesize the function of toys such as a foam disc launcher or a Bumble Ball, and then dissect the toy to determine the actual functions portrayed inside the product. The functions are then compiled into a full system model of the product. After completing this engaging in-class activity however, the quality of the functional models produced individually by the students was not desirable. These results displayed a clear disconnect between thinking in terms of a product's components and a product's functionality. Therefore, a survey was conducted of both sophomore and graduate level engineering students about their functional modeling learning experience. Based on the in-class activity and survey results, an educational tool, component functional templates, was derived to address this need that links common product components with generally recognized functionality. It is expected that, as a functional modeling teaching aid, the component functional templates will help the students associate functionality to components and in time, begin to think functionally during the engineering design process.

This paper describes one experiment to test the utility of component functional templates as a functional modeling instruction aid. Previous research by the authors has shown that problems exist with students describing functional representations of a system or subsystems. Component functional templates were derived as a means of addressing this ongoing problem. The experiment was performed on a section of sophomore level undergraduate students and consisted of both a pre and post-test. During the pre-test, the students were divided into small groups of two or three and given the task of creating a functional model for a small consumer product. The lesson prior to the task was based only on a review of the functional modeling lesson taught in a freshman design course. After the pre-test, another lecture was provided that covered the use of the component functional templates. Next, for the post-test, the students were again asked to create a functional model of the same product. It was hypothesized that the use of the templates would provide better results in the quality and accuracy of the models when compared to the models produced without the use of the templates. The results of the experiment confirmed the hypothesis that the component function templates assist novice design students to create higher quality functional models and offer a foundational basis for further experimentation and evaluation.