Engineering Faculty Internship: Direct Engineering in the Automotive Industry

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Most efforts to enable concurrent engineering to date have focused on developing the tools and techniques for designing completely new products. Design in many industries is volutionary, consisting primarily of incremental changes to existing products. This category of design is the target of direct engineering, which is concerned with giving engineers direct access to complete knowledge about the design and manufacture of a part as the part is being designed. Direct engineering differs from concurrent engineering in that this knowledge is not generated at design time, but is retrieved from an engineering database which completely documents existing designs. The project focuses on developing the key enabling component of direct engineering, the engineering design component for a specific product, and an automobile crankshaft. During a summer internship at a major automobile manufacturer, the principal investigator will work with the co-investigator and other key personnel to identify the critical crankshaft design variables and their relationships to functional issues, manufacturing, prototyping, fixture design, tooling, dunnage, etc. After completely documenting these relationships for the crankshaft, an appropriate constraint-based product representation will be developed. The second stage of the work will result in a prototype computer implementation of the product model to illustrate the concept of direct engineering for automotive crankshafts.