TOPIC : AN INCREMENTAL ENGINEERING DESIGN PROCESS

BASED ON A FLOW SIMULATOR

BY Dr. Xuefeng Li

Loyola University

SUMMARY : By Lee Emmanwori

1.) Dr. Xuefeng Li, described an incremental engineering design process based on a flow simulator in which the designer can add the components to the design, modify the existing components or delete the components that are no longer needed.

2.) Dr. Li described different phases of this incremental engineering design process as

a) An interactive system for incremental engineering design.
b) Simulation of incompressible flows based on the vortex method which is a "gridless" mothod.
c) The vortex method consists of the steps :
Blob Creation--Potential Flow Creation--Blob Tree Creation-- Velocity Evaluation. These steps are repeated until a steady state in velocity is obtained.

3.) Dr. Li also discussed the incremental engineering design process on the example of the design of transportation vehicles such as automobiles.

4.) Dr. Li emphasized the advantages (such as user-interactions, data re-usability, design efficiency) of this method over the classical grid methods using most of the existing software tools.