Material and Product Design Integration: Establishing Relationships between Design Variables of Both Domains

Abstract

Due to the increasing demand of application-specific and/or multi-functional materials, it is necessary to integrate material design and product design. To support such design integration, this paper proposes a methodology to establish the relationships of both material design variables and product design variables. These variables include the required system performances and/or other evaluation criteria, and the relevant system loadings and attributes, where the attributes include both the product structural attributes and the material properties. This is achieved by modeling the behaviors of the product and those of the used material, and identifying the dependencies between the relevant design variables from the behaviors. The variable relationships can then be used to solve various design problems, such as design evaluation, evaluation and optimization of critical design variables, and so on. A design case study is also conducted to illustrate the proposed methodology and its usefulness.