| Summary: | The engineering design process and the advancement of future computer-aided-design systems need new design aids to be used during the conceptual design
phase. This design phase is where information gathering and understanding of the
problem are developed, analyzed and broken into small more manageable elements.
These elements consist of customer requirements and engineering specifications,
many of which are converted into functional expressions that need to be satisfied. Of
these elements, it is at the most basic level of the functional expression that the
beginning form of a product is developed. Upon that initial form, consisting of the
basic envelope (area domain) of the product and defined by form features,
components and assemblies are added to fulfill the functional requirements of the
product.
This dissertation develops the architecture of a Function Driven Mechanical
Design Solution Library for the most primitive design structure - the feature. Each
feature has functional expressions associated with it, which represent the fundamental
information about the structure. The implementation uses the functionality a feature
inherently possesses to obtain solutions. By using a feature's functionality for the
search criteria during the design of mechanical components, the design engineer has
access to a wider variety of design solutions than traditional libraries are capable of
finding, and a more in depth understanding of the design. === Graduation date: 1995
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