CURRENT RESEARCH THEMES


Major Themes:

The major themes of current research at CPDM are the following:

Processes and Informatics in Product Development (Design Theory and Methodology, Creativity,Biometrics, Rationale Capture, Product Lifecycle Management)

Human Factors in Product Development (Ergonomics, Clinical and Rehabilitative engineering, Digital Human Modelling, Human-Machine Interaction) Sustainability in Product Development (Eco-Design, Life Cycle Assessment; Sustainability Analysis, Biocomposites)

Technology Integration in Product Development (Computer Aided Engineering, Optimisation, Medical Diagnostics and Therapeutics, Vehicle Safety, Design for Manufacturing and Assembly)

Advanced Manufacturing (Smart Manufacturing, Additive Manufacturing, Sustainable Manufacturing, Computational Metrology)



Description of Themes:

Processes and Informatics in Product Development (PD)

BE / B Tech or equivalent degree or Master's degree in Science, Applied Science.The processes followed for carrying out PD, and informatics associated with the PD play significant roles in innovation. For example, novelty is a major aspect of designs created, which can be significantly enhanced with biomimetic tools that help ideate with inspiration from nature. Idea-Inspire is one such leading tool that enhanced ideation fluency by a factor of three for engineers. Research in product informatics has typically resulted in gains in time and cost of product development through tools developed for bringing down-stream constraints (from Manufacturing for instance) into play during the design stage itself. One research objective in Product Informatics is to enable knowledge acquisition through the product life cycle that can then be used to impact new product development.


Human Factors in Product Development

Human factors play a significant role in NPD. Products are developed for stakeholders who have various physical and cognitive abilities and constraints. Work in this theme focus on all aspects of the product where humans are involved, a thinking that supports humans during the whole product life cycle.Many products have user interfaces, and have to interact with the user in a functional, aesthetic and meaningful manner. The specific sub-areas of research include usability engineering, digital human modelling, clinical and rehabilitative engineering, and developing UI/UX guidelines and tools and new modalities of interaction that can significantly enhance the human factors performance of products. Tools are also being developed to predict and test human performance during manufacturing and usage of products, e.g. assessment and improvement of design for assembly.


Design for Sustainable Product Development

With increased population and consumption and reduced availability of resources, both public opinion and regulations are ever stricter on compliance to sustainability in all its aspects – social, environmental and economic. For instance, a product typically produces over 20 times its mass as waste during its lifecycle. PD must take into account sustainability. Work in this area includes developing advanced models for assessing impacts, and inherent uncertainty in these assessments, for lifecycle processes for complex, global, spatio-temporally distributed products and manufacturing systems, and visualisations for these lifecycle processes; use of such tools has shown to lead to over 25 times reduction in environmental impacts in products created using such tools. Biocomposites research involve using natural materials in developing composites with similar performance as that of artificial composites, but with reduced environmental impacts.


Technology Integration in Product Development

Products have no disciplinary boundaries; intended purpose determines what technologies must go into a product. Selection and integration of right, and often diverse, technologies is critical for products to operate seamlessly to serve their purpose. It is crucial to embody and detail product concepts well, taking into account the multiple factors of importance, choice of appropriate technologies and their seamless integration. A variety of tools is being developed to make technology selection and integration more effective and efficient, so that resulting products are more functional, feasible, robust and reliable. This includes tools for selection and integration of technology, components, materials and processes, tools for computer aided engineering (CAE), advanced finite element analyses (FEA) and optimization, tools for development of medical devices, etc.


Advanced Manufacturing

Design and manufacturing must go hand in hand. With a strong flavor of design and digitalization, this theme aims to develop technologies and tools for advanced manufacturing, currently in the areas of Smart Manufacturing, Additive Manufacturing, Sustainable Manufacturing, and Computational Metrology. CPDM established the first ‘smart factory’ laboratory in India to integrate people, product, process, tools and environment within a manufacturing system, to carry out acquisition and analytics of data on these for monitoring, prognostics/diagnostics and prevention/remediation of problems, thereby enhancing productivity, reliability and safety. Sustainable manufacturing aims to make manufacturing less intensive in resources, energy and environmental impacts. Computational metrology aims to automate inspection and testing, especially for parts with complex geometry.







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