Considering human factors in early engineering design stages can improve expensive late stage processes, facilitate user safety, improve product quality and help reduce the need for physical prototyping. Currently, car pillar design (the vertical pillars between windows which connect the roof and car body) provide safety for the passengers in...
Modern engineered systems are increasingly integrated into society, decentralized, and interconnected. However, scale and complexity create unique challenges in system design, such as emergent behavior and unintended consequences. This work investigates the structural characteristics of robustness in complex engineered systems by identifying patterns of under-recognized vulnerabilities at various levels of...
In the United States, children from underserved racial/ethnic backgrounds encounter greater environmental risk both in terms of the physical environment (e.g., housing quality, access to resources like health services and jobs, and exposure to environmental toxins) and the social environment (e.g., social support, neighborhood crime, racism, and discrimination), due to...
Wind power forecasting provides valuable insights for demand response, energy market operation, and plant control optimization. Probabilistic approaches—which capture uncertainty in these complex systems by representing predictions as probability distributions—represent a growing area of research in wind energy science. However, their applications for wind-based hybrid systems, particularly those focused on...
Prototyping is a crucial step in product design and development, but it is also known as the highest sunk cost. The top 20 Research and Development (R&D) department spends 142 billion dollars, yet 40 to 46 percent of this money goes into developing products that cannot even make to the...
Practical engineering design problems are generally multi-disciplinary with limited budget and high risk in terms of life loss, economic resources, etc. In the early phase of such problems, selection of true efficient designs is desired while minimizing overall design cost by avoiding expensive search processes. However, the task is difficult...
Long field-life systems are those for which operational, as opposed to capital, expenditures dominate the life time cost of the system. In established product categories, operational experience and historical maintenance data allows engineers to make informed decisions influencing maintenance during the early design stages when design changes are at their...
As structural durability analysis is increasingly trusted during the design processes of the automotive industry, more complete and sophisticated modeling of material behavior under both static and dynamic loading conditions is paramount. This is especially true regarding the application of heavy-duty trucks, where modern designs contain large parts such as...
The objective of this research is to support DfX considerations in the early phases of design, particularly Design for the Environment. In order to include DfX considerations, especially early in the design process, there needs to be access to knowledge and information that is usually only applicable further downstream in...
Pillars in modern vehicles provide structural integrity by surrounding the windows and joining the roof with the frame. Although they protect the driver and passengers, A-pillars also create obstruction zones by limiting drivers' forward field of view leading to unforeseeable accidents or mishaps. We argue that providing a better pillar...
Over time, Open Source Software (OSS) has become indispensable in the creation and upkeep of software products, serving as the fundamental building block for widely used solutions in our daily lives, including applications that enable communication, entertainment, and productivity. A sustainable OSS ecosystem is one that attracts and retains a...
Several wave energy converter designs have been recently proposed that are made of flexible materials. Flexible devices are able to generate electricity by being stretched, and are intended to simplify deployment and maintenance concerns over existing wave energy devices. Due to the relative infancy of flexible wave energy converters, however,...
This thesis explores the relationship between design cycle models and knowledge management systems applied to various physical prototypes that the author developed from 2020 to 2023. The author walks through the process of prototyping a potty-training device in OSU’s Prototype Development Lab and an automated testing fixture for her Senior...
Modern product design drives the boundaries of innovation by encompassing complex Design-for-X objectives, and the inclusion of multidimensional stakeholders. This growing complexity in product design has left design teams unequipped, as classical design theory is bounded by designer experience, expertise, and cognition. One novel approach to tackling product complexity is...
The purpose of this work is to build a foundation of understanding and methodologies as the steps toward automating functional modeling. We have achieved significant progress in the automatic generation of functional representations, which can be connected at the interface of components to create a functional model. This work highlights...
Communication in purposeful human activity systems plays a critical role in the design, management, and change management of these systems. However, its impact on and integrated nature in purposeful human activity systems is not well understood from a holistic viewpoint. In addition, a formal definition and methodology for identifying signs...
In order to generate practical ways to easily design functional flexible lattice structures, this research seeks to find a way to predict reactive forces of compressed hyperelastic cubic lattice structures. Using 3D printed test coupons, material data was collected for use in finite element analysis. Cubic lattice structures with varying...
Wildfire impacts have intensified in many ecosystems across the western United States due to the combined impact of fire exclusion, climate change, and land management practices. However, on many of these landscapes, fire is a fundamental ecological process that has shaped vegetation structural and compositional diversity, ecosystem function, landscape pattern,...
In this work, a fully automated approach to synthesis Metal-Organic Frameworks is presented. We use graph to represent the structure of Metal-organic Frameworks and use graph grammars which are backbone rules and functional group rules to generate metal-organic framework. For a given parameter value of the user defined metal-organic framework,...
In engineering problems not all constraints can be explicitly written as mathematical functions. There needs to be a way integrate designer knowledge into the design process and preferably use that to guide an optimization problem. In this thesis, these constraints are modelled using classification surrogate models and integrated with Bayesian...