The Product Innovative Design Methodology Integrating Reverse Engineering with Optimization - A Case Study on Automotive Styling

摘要

In the styling phase of a product design, it's difficult to meet aesthetic and performance requirements simultaneously. An innovative design methodology integrating reverse engineering (RE) with optimization is illustrated to settle such a problem. In the field of automotive styling, the stylist's aesthetic intent is usually expressed by a clay model, and on the other hand, the aerodynamic performance may be ignored. Reverse engineering is used to convert a clay model to a digital model, which is then transferred to computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software to evaluate the aerodynamic performance. A variety of new design samples may be generated using free form deformation (FFD) deduced by a simple control polygon with few parameters, and the response surface method (RSM) is adopted to explore the relationships between these few parameters and two aerodynamic response variables. The final optimized solution can be found through a multi-objective genetic algorithm. A detail example is presented to verify the method.