João Fradinho

Picking the best design solution among a small collection of viable alternatives is often a part of engineering design. The traditional method to do it is the weighted multicriteria decision procedure. However, the Axiomatic Design (AD) framework does not employ weighting factors to deal with design preferences. Instead, AD uses the careful placing of each design range. This paper stresses the reasons AD does not include weighting factors—an imaginary flaw that teachers and designers should not attempt to change because that would break the rational soundness of AD teaching and practice. A numerical example supports our rationale.

The Newcomen engine (1705) and the Watt engine (1769) are good examples of coupled and uncoupled designs. The Watt engine had an efficiency of about 3%, a shallow value when compared to engines of nowadays while resulting in a significant increase at those times. According to Axiomatic Design, Watt engine had a better performance than the Newcomen design due to its uncoupled nature. This work aims at applying the same reasoning to choose between new inventions designed for recovering waste heat from engines as to produce work. The most popular of those inventions are the organic Rankine cycle (ORC) and the Kalina cycle. Marine applications use those inventions to improve the efficiency of Diesel engines because the increase of weight of the recovery system does not affect power propulsion. A controversial regarding what system to develop occurred in scientific community as well as in the industry. The application of AD to those cycles classifies ORC as an uncoupled design and the Kalina cycle as a coupled design. Therefore, the ORC might be pondered for future development regarding energy efficiency.

In the conceptual step of any industrial design, there is a considerable amount of decisions that directly affect the quality of the final product. These decisions are often made with lack of knowledge about the subjects, limitative trains of thought and repetition of traditional solutions. The present paper is focused on the use of Axiomatic Design in the design of a cork granulation industrial plant, with a particular emphasis on the Independence Axiom. An innovative design solution was made, aiming to reduce or overcome the current issues and to reevaluate many of the decisions made in the past. In this study, some parts of the production process were analysed. The verified lack of independency gave rise to new design solutions and consequently to a better production process.

The game of soccer has offered matter of wide scientific analysis about the effective application of the game theory in real-life. The field observations have often detected divergent behaviors from theoretical predictions. The basic problem comes from the fact that it is difficult to build scientific models reflecting reality as closely as possible. Axiomatic Design offers us a powerful tool of rational decomposition of a real and complex issue into elementary components. Independence Axiom guarantees that game decomposition will define a set of elementary actions logically consistent and free of redundancies. At the same time, Information Axiom can allow to select among alternative strategies, those that they predict the actions with a higher probability rate of success. In this paper, it is suggested the use of the Axiomatic Design methodology in the Collectively Exhaustive and Mutually Exclusive (CEME) mode, as a tool of analysis of the penalty shoot-out in extra time. This methodology allows to define the game strategies for goalkeepers and penalty takers. It will be analyzed both, the case when the opponents' behavior is well known and the situation when the statistics about the opponents are unknown. Axiomatic Design allows the process of decomposition to be simplified, enabling the selection of optimal game strategies. These strategies correspond to Nash’s equilibrium solutions when you already know about your opponents' game behavior. On the contrary, when penalty takers whose behavior is unknown, then it is always possible to define a strategy corresponding to the Bayesian equilibrium game solutions.

MATEC Web of Conferences, open access proceedings in Materials science, Engineering and Chemistry

MATEC Web of Conferences, open access proceedings in Materials science, Engineering and Chemistry

MATEC Web of Conferences, open access proceedings in Materials science, Engineering and Chemistry