Restrictions of production engineering on micro-specific product development

The influences deriving from technology on the functions achievable by means of product design are typical characteristics of the development of micro-technological products. As a result, unlike the conventional design process the function attainable in micro technology due to product design appears to be less subjected to certain requirements. Multitechnological influences, resulting from production processes, material characteristics or micro-specific effects have an especially restrictive impact on the design of machine elements. On the basis of the product development process for primary shaped micro components from metallic and ceramic materials a method is presented which makes it possible to detect the know-how provided by disciplines subsequent and adjacent to the design process, having influence on the design of the machine element and interpret this relevant to design. The computer-aided availability of knowledge is accomplished with a knowledge-based design environment.The work presented is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft within the collaborative research center (Sonderforschungsbereich) 499 Development, production and quality assurance of primary shaped micro components from metallic and ceramic materials. This paper was presented at the First International Colloquium Micro Production in February 2003.     

Design of expert systems for integrated production automation

An approach to the design of expert systems for integrated production automation is presented. The major components in an integrated manufacturing system consist of corporate planning, marketing planning, research and development, engineering design, production planning, manufacturing, warehousing, and product distribution. These components are linked by management information flow, technology information flow, as well as materials flow. An intelligent computer is used to integrate information flow and to control materials flow. This paper discusses characteristics of the future factory, elements of knowledge based systems, and the design of computer based expert systems for production planning, for engineering design, and for integrated manufacturing.     

SU8-micromechanical structures with in situ fabricated movable parts

 We report on the versatile application potential of SU8 photoepoxy for movable micromechanical components. Its outstanding resolution, aspect ratio, and attainable film thicknesses enable the design of structures that allow lateral mechanical interaction of voluminous micro parts. We additionally developed a sacrificial layer process enabling the release of in situ fabricated micro parts as well as large area parts used for capping and packaging. The applicability of this technology is demonstrated on gearwheels in a turbine configuration, a micro fluidic channel with integrated check valve, and an advanced multilayer capping technology with precise feather key fit. Received: 10 August 2000/Accepted: 24 September 2001     

Sharing engineering design knowledge in a distributed environment

Engineering design is a complex activity, relying heavily on know-how gained from personal experience. Competitive pressures and new technology are making further demands on the skills and experience of designers, as effective knowledge reuse in design is seen as increasingly vital, and the work of design teams is often a collaborative and distributed activity. University students with a thorough knowledge of the engineering domain can be ill prepared for professional practice, with its increasing reliance on skills and know-how as well as knowledge of theory. Our approach aims to better prepare students for professional practice, through hands-on experience of design reuse, participation in distributed collaboration, and the development of presentation and documentation skills. Our case-study in the domain of modelling engineering systems, in which the course materials themselves are evolving and distributed, has ramifications for the publication model of educational materials, and the way students should be prepared for working life.     

Sharing engineering design knowledge in a distributed environment

Engineering design is a complex activity, relying heavily on know-how gained from personal experience. Competitive pressures and new technology are making further demands on the skills and experience of designers, as effective knowledge reuse in design is seen as increasingly vital, and the work of design teams is often a collaborative and distributed activity. University students with a thorough knowledge of the engineering domain can be ill prepared for professional practice, with its increasing reliance on skills and know-how as well as knowledge of theory. Our approach aims to better prepare students for professional practice, through hands-on experience of design reuse, participation in distributed collaboration, and the development of presentation and documentation skills. Our case-study in the domain of modelling engineering systems, in which the course materials themselves are evolving and distributed, has ramifications for the publication model of educational materials, and the way students should be prepared for working life.     

From MEMS devices to smart integrated systems

The smart integrated systems of tomorrow would demand a combination of micromechanical components and traditional electronics. On-chip solutions will be the ultimate goal. One way of making such systems is to implement the mechanical parts in an ordinary CMOS process. This procedure has been used to design an oscillator consisting of a resonating cantilever beam and a CMOS Pierce feedback amplifier. The resonating frequency is changed if the beam is bent by external forces. The paper describes central features of this procedure and highlights the design considerations for the CMOS-MEMS oscillator. The circuit is used as an example of a “VLSI designer” way of making future integrated micromechanical and microelectronic systems on-chip. The possibility for expansion to larger systems is reviewed.     

Micromechanical three-axial tactile force sensor for micromaterial characterisation

 A three-axial tactile force sensor for the investigation of micromechanical structures has been developed using silicon micromachining technology. The sensor is capable of performing mechanical micro material characterisation such as the determination of the spring constant of complex micromechanical structures. Another application for this sensor is dimensional metrology where it has been tested as a 3D probe in a test set-up for coordinate measurements.     

Supporting design of primary shaped micro parts and systems through provision of experience

Nowadays, miniaturization is one observable trend in the development of new technical systems. Based on the miniaturization of existing macroscopic production technologies e.g. powder injection molding, a new process chain for the development of primary shaped microparts and systems is being developed in the collaborative research center 499 “design, production and quality assurance of molded micro components made of metallic and ceramic materials”. Because of the constantly evolving miniaturization and growing complexity of the developed microparts and systems, new development processes and methods are needed. Because of the mostly restrictive influence of the downstream phases (production and quality assurance) over the design phase, micro-specific design processes require well-founded knowledge about micro-specific manufacturing techniques (e.g. restrictions) which may be stored in form of design rules. However, many micro-specific aspects cannot be represented in design rules. In this paper the authors propose a new approach to ensure this other kind of knowledge.     

Correlations between production process, states and mechanical properties of microspecimens made of zirconia

For a safe design of micromechanical components, a reliable database of their properties is required. The existing material properties of macroscopic specimens normally cannot be used due to the neglect of some important aspects of the “micro world”, e.g. the ratio of surface to volume is much higher which results in a larger influence of surface defects on the material strength. Detailed analysis of the microstructure and surface topography of microcomponents in combination with their mechanical properties is very expedient for straight-forward optimization of the manufacturing process. Using the resulting data of the properties investigated, correlations between production process, states and mechanical properties of the micro bending specimens made of ZrO₂ using low-pressure injection molding were identified. These correlations will be used to established a concept for dimensioning of mechanically loaded microparts.     

Extreme aspect ratio NiFe gear wheels for the production of commercially available Micro Harmonic Drive® gears

In a close collaboration the team of Micromotion, micro resist technology, BESSY, and LSU-CAMD have successfully mastered the challenges of LIGA production of ultra-precision microparts for Micro Harmonic Drive^® gears. The complementary expertise ranging from design and application know-how to process research and technical support resulted in high quality LIGA microparts and superior Micro Harmonic Drive^® gears taking advantages of the free 2D design capability and material choice. It is also an excellent example that through contributions from partners with different background and expertise LIGA precision parts can be produced with high quality and yield and for a market competitive price.     

Micro assembly injection moulding

Injection moulding is established as one of the most common manufacturing processes of thermoplastics due to its high degree of automation and the short cycle times. Micro injection moulding is a rapidly growing technology that allows for the efficient production of very complex micro parts in high series. The “Market Analysis for Microsystems II 2002–2005” of the Nexus Task Force anticipates a yearly growth in the field of micro system technology of about 20% (Wechsung et al. 2002). This study identifies in addition to the continuous miniaturization the growing use of polymers in micro systems (Schneider et al. 2001). No other material group offers this wide range of material properties and permits to choose processing parameters and application properties according to necessities (Gächter 2000). While the production processes of micro technical components are mainly controllable, the assembly of these components to hybrid micro systems is a bottleneck to the industrial large scale production. The assembly itself represents a large fraction of the added product value and gains in importance with growing complexity and miniaturization of the systems.     

Mass customized/personalized manufacturing in Industry 4.0 and blockchain: Research challenges,main problems,and the design of an information architecture

Mass customized and mass personalized production has become facilitated by the fourth industrial revolution. The resulting industrial environments require the development of information systems able to take the specifications of customers and convey them to the production system in such a way as to contribute to the coordination of all the stakeholders and activities required to fulfill the orders of the customers. This is beyond the capabilities of traditional systems based on MRP and ERP, since the information should be managed in a flexible and decentralized way to exploit the Smart Manufacturing facilities of Industry 4.0. Blockchain, instead, is a technology that provides those features constituting a sound information supporting basis for mass customized/personalized production. Consequently, we explore the potential of blockchain as an information technology able to support industries that base their business models on mass customized/personalized production processes. This survey allows us to identify important challenges for further developments, highlighting three issues in the production setting: (i) to deepen the interoperability of systems, (ii) to generate more implementations, and (iii) to develop efficient consensus protocols. As a response to these insights we provide a conceptual design of how blockchain contributes to managing efficiently mass customized production systems. In our design the information of customer specifications can be fused with data from the production process to generate a plan to fulfill the demand. This design arises as a solution approach to three stated problem, which are faced by mass customized production systems.     

Designing information systems in social context: a goal and scenario modelling approach

In order to design a better information system, a designer would like to have notations to visualize how design experts’ know-how can be applied according to one's specific social and technology situation. We propose the combined use of a goal-oriented requirements language (GRL) and a scenario-oriented notation Use Case Maps (UCM) for representing design knowledge of information systems. Goal-oriented modelling is used throughout the requirements and design process. In GRL, goals are used to depict business objectives and system requirements, both functional and non-functional. Tasks are used to represent different ways for achieving goals. Means-ends reasoning is used to explore alternative solutions and their operationalizations into implementable system constructs. Social context is modelled in terms of dependency relationships among agents and roles. Scenarios expressed in UCM are used to describe elaborated business processes or workflow. The complementary use of goal-oriented modelling with GRL and scenario modelling with UCM is illustrated with an example of designing a web-based training system.     

Applications of full-field optical methods in micro-mechanics and material engineering

 Current trends in the development of micro-scale components, structures and systems place unprecedented requirements on their designers. To satisfy these demands, new experimental tools have to be employed along with the computational solutions. The biggest challenge includes the experimental knowledge of micromechanical behaviour of materials and to design validation of finished products. This information is provided by electronic holography and grating interferometry used as full-field, noninvasive experimental techniques. The usefulness of these methods are shown by several examples including the determination of local material properties of polycrystalline, composit and smart materials, as well as dynamic characteristic of structures.     

用于微器件装配的微操作系统

微器件装配技术是微机械的关键技术之一,本文从微 器件装配系统的特性和功能出发,提出了一套用于微装配的微操作系统设计方案,并对系统 各个组成部分进行分析,介绍了系统实现的方法．     

DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTELLIGENT PRODUCT DESIGN SYSTEM: INTEGRATION STRATEGIES

Conventional computer-aided design (CAD) packages have drastically reduced the workload of the human designer and shortened the product design cycle. However, the degree of effort and volume of information required to use these tools limit their use to the later stages of design. Intelligent computer-aided design (ICAD) systems have sought to provide a more complete design tool to assist the designer in all phases of design. ICAD systems incorporate conventional CAD elements as well as knowledge engineering constructs. The level of integration between different components of an ICAD system determines its usefulness. Most commercial intelligent CAD packages are tied to a specific set of CAD tools, restricting their application domains. This dependence on specific software tools can be reduced by using general purpose modules to interface with available CAD packages. This paper discusses a method of introducing knowledge engineering technology to help develop an advanced intelligent product design system by integrating ICAD's Concept Modeller with SDRC's l-DEAS package for engineering product design. This integration is necessary because neither the Concept Modeller nor the I-DEAS package provides any unified design environment where users can access both symbolic and numerical design tools as needed to carry out design synthesis and analysis activities. Interfacing engineering design and knowledge processing together is not an easy task. The task is further complicated since it needs to be done only by those who have enough knowledge of both technologies, and also because it may result in reorganization of the traditional design process altogether. The proposed intelligent product design system uses artificial intelligence techniques to take care of human experts knowledge and it advocates the use of several commercial software packages that come from a variety of sources (and are proven to be robust) to perform design synthesis in a cost-efficient and timely manner. The technique described here is relatively easy to implement and is well suited to industrial needs.     

An application of knowledge based modelling using scripts

Knowledge management (KM) takes an increasingly significant place in the companies. The field of the KM aims to answer the problems of memory within companies by proposing methodologies to formalise know-how during the different steps of production. The KM is a domain with many ramifications and applications. One of them, so called Knowledge Based Engineering, search how to record knowledge from experts to put them in CAD software. Our study relates to the possibility of using the knowledge of an expert in modelling and, more particularly, on the automatic modelling of filling systems in foundry.     

Design of machines and robots endowed with a permanent learning ability

Modern methodologies for integrated design, concurrent engineering and mechatronics allow for the implementation of intelligent machines. This paper presents an approach for the design of intelligent controllers for robotics and production machines with a permanent learning ability. It allows one to obtain systems that are evolutionary and cooperative, both through their design and during their full lifetime. The system know-how increases with experience through structuring and generalization of the knowledge base. During the design of the system controller, the expert knowledge and the properties of the analytical models are used to anticipate the system behavior, and to establish the learning mechanisms. The initiation of the knowledge base is based on numerical simulation results obtained during the design.     

The role of technological know-how in c-commerce success

Collaborative commerce (c-commerce), involving the use of technology to enable and facilitate inter-organizational processes, is an increasingly important area for technology innovation and investment, and has become a backbone of modern business activity. A vital basis for enhancing the likelihood of c-commerce success is an understanding of the factors that contribute to that success. This research studies one set of such factors: the facets of an organization's technological know-how for performing inter-firm collaboration. It builds on prior research that finds a link between organizational know-how and successful inter-firm collaboration to develop hypotheses about the relationship between an organization's technological know-how for performing inter-organizational collaboration and the success of such collaboration. These hypotheses are tested using data collected from survey respondents who have led c-commerce initiatives. We find support for the proposition that there are aspects of an organization's technological-collaborative know-how that have a significant positive relationship with the firm's c-commerce success.     

Knowledge engineering and CAD

The technology of Computer Aided Design (CAD) has rapidly been changing the processes of machine design, especially in detail and production design. Conventional CAD systems are necessary in production design where precise geometrical data are indispensable, but we can point out some problems of those systems from a point of view of the total machine design process. Though the main aim of introducing CAD systems is to increase designers' creativities, it is doubtful whether designers are really supported by such CAD systems. We think that knowledge engineering is useful to improve such situations. In this paper, we discuss these problems and we study the feasibilities of future CAD systems that can really help designers very intelligently and efficiently. We also show some results of our experimental systems applying knowledge engineering.