Session: DFMLC-02-02: Design for Manufacturing, Assembly, and Integration

Paper Number: 148328

148328 - Automating the Spatial Integration of a Reconfigurable Battery Electric Vehicle Thermal Management System 

In recent years, the convergence of design methods and manufacturing capabilities has driven transformative technological advancements. Notably, electronic design automation and lithography techniques have revolutionized computing, and the gains of topology optimization alongside additive manufacturing are just starting to be realized. Presently, a similar convergence shows promise for the design and construction of large-scale engineering systems, such as cars, ships, aircraft, and spacecraft. The layout of these systems has traditionally involved at least some manual design, and is therefore constrained by human cognition.

The holistic automation of design and construction of large-scale systems is an ambitious goal that will require many significant steps. This presentation focuses on automating the (normally manual and highly labor-intensive) process of spatially integrating reconfigurable systems. Significant progress has been made in automating the exploration of system architectures, including enumeration techniques and the performance analysis of reconfigurable systems. However, neither of these design automation or modeling strategies can account for spatial layout considerations. It is unknown whether architectures identified through these methods are physically realizable until the spatial aspects of design are completed, including spatial physics in- teractions. Further, the performance metrics used in the cited methods do not account for how the spatial properties of system elements are often the driving factor of size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) metrics. For example, choosing an electrical actuator that seems to perform better than a hydraulic counterpart, but whose lower power density and consequently larger size may obstruct the removal of several other key components, resulting in significantly longer operational downtime for maintenance.

Presenting Author: Chad Peterson University of Illinois

Presenting Author Biography: Charles “Chad” Peterson is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying systems and entrepreneurial engineering. His research is focused on design method creation and analysis for holistically optimizing the spatial configuration of systems.

Authors:

Chad Peterson University of Illinois
Reihaneh Jahedan University of Illinois
James Allison University of Illinois