Kenneth D. Longacre
Judy M. Vance
Iowa Center for Emerging Manufacturing Technology
Iowa State University
Ames, IA
Motif ’95 Conference Proceedings, Washington D.C., Nov. 16-17, 1995.
Abstract
The design of complex mechanical systems is often accomplished by dividing the task into the design of smaller subsystems. When design changes are made at the subsystem level, the affect of these changes on other subsystems can be unknown. Further, when the subsystems are optimized, the end result is a design consisting of optimal subsystems, not necessarily the overall optimal design. This is often the case because design changes that result in improving the performance of one subsystem, often degrade the performance of other subsystems. In other words, optimizing the subsystem sub-optimizes the system. This design dilemma motivated the development of software that allows a user to specify design changes and project the performance effects on several subsystems interactively. Due to the large amount of information that needs to be supplied to the designer, computer graphics tools are used to display the data. The software is written using C, OSF/Motif version 1.2.3 and OpenGL and is implemented on a Silicon Graphics Onyx workstation running Irix 5.2.
For a more information on this project, refer to the Research Project: Visualization of Structural Response Using Design Sensitivity Analysis.
