| Everyone agrees that the fulfillment of a human need or desire is the first objective for any engineering design project. But, keeping the product working for the prescribed design lifetime is as important as producing a functional object. In other words, it is the primary responsibility of mechanical designers to ensure that their design functions as intended for the prescribed design lifetime and, at the same time, that it is competitive in the market-place.;The development of a computer-aided-design software system intended to help designers avert mechanical failures is the main subject of this thesis work.;If competitive and reliable products are to be designed, the designer has to study the behavior of materials carefully, to assess the nature of actual service conditions, and most importantly to understand the many modes of mechanical failure. Unfortunately, there are thousands of failure case studies in the literature. It is very difficult for a mechanical designer to remember all of them. Although it might be possible, there is no way for him to systematically check his own design against all these failure cases one by one in his mind. Therefore, the task of storing human experience painfully acquired through previous failure cases and effectively helping the designer in the prevention of the repetition of these failures is the main goal of this research project. |
