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Argues that the costs and problems of quality are largely predetermined in product development and, therefore, there are limits to what can be achieved thereafter by the application of best‐practice manufacture and quality control. Presents knowledge‐based design‐for‐quality methods which enable a business to identify product characteristics which represent potential failures and their associated costs. Discusses application modes and includes a product case study.

Based on fieldwork carried out on two Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council‐funded projects in the area of design, the paper presents the details of an assessment approach which has been developed to assess the use and application of quality tools and techniques in the new product design and development process. Its use will help management recognise the symptoms, root causes, issues and problems that are adversely affecting NPDD, with respect to application (or lack of it) of quality tools and techniques.

Societies go through complex challenges in the face of the vertiginous increase in disasters, mostly produced by the effects of extreme events. The lack of capacity to deal with disasters is evident, especially in developing countries, as in the case of Peru. Under such a premise, this paper contributes to strengthening the country’s capacities, through an evaluation of national disaster resilience to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation-driven hazards caused by the El Niño disaster event between 2016 and 2017 on the Peruvian coast.

By reviewing the literature, various hazards were identified, such as heavy rainfalls and cascading hazards, such as floods and landslides. Even though risk assessments were carried out, 169 people died and essential infrastructure was severely impacted and lost. Through a 12-criteria resilience assessment framework sub-divided into sustainable development and disaster risk reduction, a diagnosis of national disaster resilience was carried out, along with a disaster risk management evaluation. Under such assessments, strategic recommendations were proposed to enhance the resilience of the country.

The lack of resilience of the country is reflected in the evaluated criteria, the most negative being the built environment due to infrastructure system’s vulnerability to hazards, and the lack of social development, despite national economic growth in Peru.

The research is extremely valuable because it bridges the knowledge gap on disaster resilience in Peru. In addition, the methodology, as well as the multi-topic assessment framework, can be used for other analyses, which are key to building greater capacity in nations around the globe.

Developments in online learning today closely resemble the development of modern traditional education. In the latter half of the twentieth century, new judicial decisions and law guided traditional education from exclusive to inclusive, from inaccessible to accessible, and from curriculum-centered to student-centered. The authors present a brief history of these developments and compare them to current trends in online learning. Notably, online learning programs seem to be making the same mistakes present in traditional education’s development – mistakes that took decades to correct. The authors suggest theories and practices that can bridge the gap between current trends and online learning’s future promise.

Concept design practices in engineering are not common across industry or academia. There are a number of well-known tools and methods acknowledged as useful in facilitating concept designing, that is, to assist idea generation, aid evaluation and final selection of one winning concept from many. Combinations of these popular concept design tools and methods provide various systematic methodologies by which practitioners propose to conduct or teach concept designing. In this paper, effective practices and trends are observed through the application of a specific concept design methodology over a range of different projects in electromechanical systems design.

The concept design methodology utilised in this study has been developed through the adoption of various tools and methods shown to be beneficial to concept designing, supported by previous positive experiences and successful utilisation associated with electromechanical systems research projects in academia. Each stage of the methodology is discussed and six case studies are presented, which are used to explore effective practices for concept designing.

Analysis of the case study data reveals the most popular criteria for the selection of concepts in electromechanical systems design, the number of selection criteria and number of initial concepts ideally required to converge on a final winning concept more efficiently, that is without the need for a more detailed second stage of selection using performance metrics.

Rarely are detailed studies undertaken in concept design, first, to address the justification for the concept design methodology adopted and, second, to show how effective practices emerge through the analysis of non-subjective data over a number of concept design projects. Although the paper uses only six case studies in electromechanical systems design, it is hoped that the approach presented promotes the possible future development of a framework for verification of concept design methodologies across different products, sectors and user groups.

Under this heading are published regularly abstracts of all Reports and Memoranda of the Aeronautical Research Council, Reports and Technical Translations of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration and publications of other similar Research Bodies as issued.

Under this heading arc published regularly abstracts of all Reports and Memoranda of the Aeronautical Research Council, Technical Reports and Translations of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration and publications of other similar Research Bodies as issued.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the statistical tolerancing technique to analyze the dual responses of APFA arm height deviation with respect to next stage of disk assembly process and simultaneously optimize and allocate the required tolerance of the responses onto its components at minimum cost of manufacturing and the quality loss.

The relationships between the dual responses of APFA heights and the geometric dimensions and tolerances of APFA components, and orientation of the assembled part with respect to disk assembly were first defined. The effects of the APFA orientation, and the component tolerances on the distributions and variations of the responses were derived and investigated in terms of resultant product/process performance, quality loss, and the cost of assembly. The tolerance cost-based objective function is then formulated as the combined manufacturing/assembly cost and the quality loss. Direct search method was used to find the best feasible tolerance solutions satisfying the required product performance at minimum cost.

The constructed relationship or transfer functions of the dual responses were probabilistic depending on the orientation of part with respect to the next assembly process. The Monte Carlo simulation is empirically suitable for the computation of the conditional distributions of the responses against the first-order linear approximation of component variances. The proposed solution of tolerance control plan increases the product performances, C _pm , from 0.6 to be at least 1. The proposed tolerance allocation plans will reduce the amount of rework currently as high as 5 percent to at most 0.01 percent with minimally increased assembly cost.

This proposed methodology to design and allocate component tolerances is suitable and applicable to the APFA assembly process. The derived assembly functions of probabilistic type relating the responses to the process and component characteristics can represent the actual dynamic of assembled part better than a traditional single deterministic function developed under static concept. This presented methodology can be applied to other assembly cases where quality characteristic depends on the part dynamic.

This research simultaneously optimized the dual APFA height deviation responses with minimum cost of tolerance and quality loss using two different conditional distributions and transfer functions of the resultant deviations generated from dynamic of APFA with respect to disk.

The improvement of the quality of design and the reduction of failure related cost is seen as a crucial competitive requirement for UK manufacturing industry. To achieve these goals, industry must adopt current methods in support of design for quality (DFQ) for analysing potential problems and predicting quality, and integrate these effectively with the appropriate stages of their new product development process. The utilisation and success rate of these techniques in UK companies is, however, relatively low compared to those in countries such as the USA and Japan. In this paper, the fundamental concepts and key areas of opportunity in design improvement using the main DFQ support techniques are reviewed and a framework for their application and integration is presented to support concurrent product development. The typical experiences and problems concerning the application and implementation of techniques are discussed and areas where new research should be directed are touched on so that DFQ techniques may better enhance industrial practice in the achievement of high quality products.

In this paper, a turbine blade was optimized by multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) method. This turbine blade optimization is based on the optimization frame software iSIGHT, in which four disciplines (aerodynamics, thermal dynamics, structural mechanics and structural dynamics) have been integrated. Two commercial discipline analysis soft wares, NUMECA and ANSYS, are coupled in the platform iSIGHT. The three dimensional (3‐D) model of a blade was firstly parameterized. And then a set of parameters are chosen to optimize the blade to obtain the better overall properties. The result shows that the overall performances of the turbine blade have been improved remarkably after it is optimized by using the MDO method.