Engineering design

The objective of this research was to characterize the seawater transport and its effect on the transverse tensile strength of a carbon/vinylester composite. The moisture contents of neat vinylester and unidirectional carbon/vinylester composite panels immersed in seawater were monitored until saturation. A model for moisture up-take was developed based on superposition of Fickian diffusion, and Darcy’s law for capillary transport of water. Both the predicted and measured saturation times increased with increasing panel size, however the diffusion model predicts much longer times while the capillary model predicts shorter time than observed experimentally. It was also found that the saturation moisture content decreased with increasing panel size. Testing of macroscopic and miniature composite transverse tensile specimens, and SEM failure inspection revealed more fiber/matrix debonding in the seawater saturated composite than the dry composite, consistent with a slightly reduced transverse tensile strength.

Computer modeling has become indispensable to the engineering process, from initially refining an idea with computer-aided tools to implementing the final steps in manufacturing a product. This thesis addresses the issue of design of a housing of LCD watch. An approach is developed to determine an optimal LCD watch design. An analysis and development of a design of experiment is performed to identify the major controllable variables to performed a statistical significance analysis on different shapes for LCD glass. A housing of LCD watch is modeled using Pro/Engineer (a parametric-based solid modeling system), and different shapes of LCD glass are tested using P3/Patran. A non-destructive static experiment is performed on the LCD. This experiment consisted of measuring the maximum displacement and equivalent stress. Taguchi method was used to analyze this experiment.

The increasing system design complexity is negatively impacting the overall system design productivity by increasing the cost and time of product development. One key to overcoming these challenges is exploiting Component Based Engineering practices. However it is a challenge to select an optimum component from a component library that will satisfy all system functional and non-functional requirements, due to varying performance parameters and quality of service requirements. In this thesis we propose an integrated framework for component selection. The framework is a two phase approach that includes a system modeling and analysis phase and a component selection phase. Three component selection algorithms have been implemented for selecting components for a Network on Chip architecture. Two algorithms are based on a standard greedy method, with one being enhanced to produce more intelligent behavior. The third algorithm is based on simulated annealing. Further, a prototype was developed to evaluate the proposed framework and compare the performance of all the algorithms.