Research On Modular Design Methods For Product Life Cycle Engineering

Much attention around the world has recently been pain to environmental issues."Green”,“low carbon economy" and "sustainable development" have been the common theme of the whole human society.From the perspective of environment,the product life cycle is composed of “material extraction phase”,“manufacturing phase”,“usage and maintenance phase” and “end-of-life phase”.Conventional product design methods consider only functional and manufacturing design elements.Because of lack of systematic life cycle analysis,there will exist many conflicts(inconsistent)of the life cycle options among product components.Those conflicts of life cycle options among components in a product module will increase the difficulty of processes for environment and require more cost.By grouping components into modules,modular design can transform the strong conflicts among components into week conflicts among modules,according to the life cycle element analysis.Modular design for life cycle engineering has become a hot research subject.This research,which is part of the "Research Project on Environmentally Friendly Product Design Based on Simulation and Genetic Algorithm(No.50775141)and " Research Project on Green Design for Product Variety and Product Environmental Performance(No.51075275)funded by National Science Foundation Grant of China,works on four types of research issues about modular design for life cycle engineering: 1.Life cycle module identification method for single product:Based on the excising research of our lab on modular design for life cycle engineering,a life-cycle module identification method with adapted constraints is proposed.By re-grouping the components of existing product,new modules are identified to improve the environmental performance.First,the environmental indicator for a module is modeled considering the reuse,recycling and maintenance.Second,functional constraint is proposed by functional flow model;and assembly constraint is proposed by Graph Theory.Finally,the optimal green module identification problem is solved by Group Genetic algorithm.A case study of a fridge is conducted.2.Life cycle module identification method for product family : A life cycle module identification method based on Group Genetic algorithm is proposed with adapted constraints.By improving the End-of-life performance of the product family the closed loop life cycle can be implement.First,the interaction between commonality and environmental performance of product family is discussed,and then a new environmental performance indicator is proposed.Second,design constraint of commonality is constructed with modified design matrix decomposition method.Finally,the optimal green module identification problem is solved by a new parallel Group Genetic algorithm.A case study of a fridge family is conducted.3.Research on the life cycle module interface for the design reusability:The reusability of module is one of the key elements of product closed loop life cycle.To improve the reusability,a design method of life cycle module interface and its usage method are proposed.First,according to the requirements of configuration design,interfaces are categorized into three main types.For each type of interface,the method of interface design and automatically obtaining its parameter data are proposed.Second,a multidisciplinary optimization method is developed to deal with the conflicts among variant outputs.Since the design method is composed of many design and analysis technologies implemented in different software platform,a system integration method is proposed.All software are integrated in UG/KF platform by Windows API.And text file are adopted as data exchange file.4.Development of software prototype:In order to encourage application of modular design for life cycle engineering,a prototype is developed.It is developed with.net framework and C# language.First the functions are designed by customer requirements analysis.Second the system framework is designed based on typical three-layer architecture.Finally each function of the prototype is completed.