| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 機械工程系所 === 95 === This study focuses on the mechanism design of mandibular advancement devices (MAD). A complete engineering design process including market survey, quality function deployment (QFD), conceptual design and embodiment design is used.
Before the design process proceeded, the realization of snoring is necessary. Snoring is prevalent and is the most significant feature of sleep-disordered breathing (SDB). Ignore the therapies of SDB will lead to serious problems in health. Based on the research of mechanisms, diagnosis, and treatments of snoring, oral appliances are ensured in therapeutic effect and compliance, especially the MAD.
Market survey includes commercial product reviews and patent analyses. Due to pay more attention to the sleep medicine, the oral appliances are considered as a standard treatment of snoring that promoted by American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). There are more and more adjustable MADs developed since 1995. According to the patent analyses, there are many drawbacks existing in the present design, such as uncomfortable, high cost, bulky volume, and complex to adjust, etc. According to the experiences of usage, this device is suffered from the failure problem which requires to be improved in the future.
In accordance with the procedure of QFD, the customers’ requirements are obtained and translated to the measurable engineering specifications. Evaluate the commercial product to ensure the competition specifications, and set the engineering target at the end of the QFD process. In the conceptual design phase, a systematic procedure for generating concepts combines the functional decomposition which is used to divide the MAD into several sub-functions and the brainstorming method which is used to generate concepts for sub-functions. After that, four concepts are generated by the conceptual design process. The finite element analysis (FEA) is introduced to proceed the strength simulation for all of the concepts and one commercial product to evaluate the performance between each other. Finally, the decision-matrix method is used to evaluate all of the concepts based on the customers’ requirements and their own importance to select the best one. The comparison between engineering targets and specifications of the final design is carried out to estimate the performance of the final design, and to be considered as a criterion for further design works.
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