Question

Identify five product, structure or system designs you think can be improved. For your initial post, pick one of the five and write a preliminary problem statement for the engineering design process.

Answer 1

The engineering design process is comprised of many assumptions. It shall consider only the linear part of the stress vs. strain curve, and It will neglect the nonlinearity present in the curve. Because of the linear relationship assumption between the stress vs. strain curve, the sections obtained were large. Hence there exists the question of economy.

The later designs the ultimate load design, Plastic design has bearly managed to account for the nonlinearity. Hence, there is a considerable reduction in the cross-section of the members (by considering the strength of every layer). An improvement was observed in the economy.

When you measure the strength of a concrete cube or tensile stress of a steel rod, we can't get the same result repeatedly because of the presence of the randomness in the material, test temperature, human error, randomness in the equipment. To consider the safety of the structure or the member, probabilistic design (Reliability) has come into existence, which shall design the components accounting the mean and standard deviation of the data observed. It shall not only ensure the economy but also develops the components/ structure for a given level of risk. The principal objective of this design approach is to optimize the risk level to a minimum or the level mentioned by the local authorities.

Further design approaches can be fuzzy logic, Implementation of Deep neural networks etc.,

I hope you have understood.

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