Iterative and Participative Axiomatic Design Process in complex mechanical assemblies: case study on fusion engineering

Abstract

The present paper proposes a structured Product Development Lifecycle (PDL) model to deal with the concept design stage of complex assemblies. The proposed method provides a systematic approach to design, aimed to improve requirements management, project management and communication among stakeholders as well as to avoid project failures reducing project development time. This research also provides suggestions and recommendations for utilizing different analysis, synthesis and assessment methodologies along with the proposed approach. The process developed, named Iterative and Participative Axiomatic Design Process (IPADeP), is consistent with ISO/IEC 15288: 2008 – “Systems and software engineering”, and INCOSE Systems engineering handbook. It is an iterative and incremental design process, participative and requirements driven, based on the theory of Axiomatic Product Development Lifecycle (APDL). IPADeP provides a systematic methodology in which, starting from a set of experts’ assumptions, a number of conceptual solutions are generated, analysed and evaluated. Based on the results obtained, new iterations can be performed for each level of decomposition while product requirements are refined. In this paper, we applied IPADeP to the initial phase of conceptual design activities for DEMO divertor-to-vacuum vessel locking system in order to propose new innovative solutions

Structural analysis of DEMO divertor cassette body and design study based on RCC-MRx

“…The pre-conceptual design phase is an iterative design process aimed at developing different concepts that potentially meet the design requirements and analysing each concept in order to find the "best solution" [11]- [12]. In this phase, more than in the others, major changes occur constantly, thus a parametric design approach and the use of lighter FEA models are crucial to speed-up the whole design process, incorporating modifications to the models efficiently [13]- [14].…”

Systems Engineering approach for the concept design of the Crystal Eye detector

“…The design parameters have been then associated to system components, which have been realized in CAD environment to generate the first design concept. The CAD model of the first Crystal Eye concept was built by a parametric approach and it was conceived to support structural/performance analyses, optimization processes and Verification and Validation (V&V) [1,2,4].…”

Configuration management of the EU DEMO conceptual design data

“…ORACLE AGILE) but have been eliminated due to less established CATIA integration and limited user base within the fusion community. From the PDM requirements some high level evaluation criteria were established with the importance weighting corresponding to numbers according to the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (F-AHP) [4,5] (Table 1). The evaluation reduced the selection down to two tools, SMARTEAM and ENOVIA V6 each with similar scores.…”