AME412B: Mechanical Engineering Design

Spring 2008

TOOLKIT - Manual describing class deliverables, class expectations, grading, and procurement. Also includes a section on technical writing and formatting of technical reports.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY - Projects requiring intellectual property to be transferred to the sponsor are marked as such on the SCPM project matching tool. Additionally, some sponsors may require that confidentiality agreements be signed the students. See the Toolkit for more details. (Sample IP Agreement)

ACCLARO- Axiomatic Design Software

TRIZ- Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. A systematic methodology for solving design related problems. (Also see http://www.innovation-triz.com/triz/walkthrough.html)

FUZZY FRONT END - refers to all of the ambiguous steps that must be taken at the beginning of a project. Fuzziness is maximum at the beginning and decreases at each stage. Early on, at the initiation of a project, no one has yet clearly defined the problem, much less the solution. It is "fuzzy" because, initially, there are no sharp boundaries defining what the customer wants or needs. Even as the customer needs become clearer, there is always still fuzziness in translating these needs into functional requirements. Two different teams will usually come up with two different sets of FR's. Even after the FR's have been defined, there are still many ways to provide solutions to the FR's. The FFE has usually ended by the time the process parameters are being selected and pure engineering analysis can step in to provide unambiguous answers.

RUBRICS - Rubrics for grading class deliverables.