Robust design: Improving design through design clarity

This module focuses on robust design in the early stages of development. In this course, you will learn a systematic approach to mechanical design analysis with the purpose eliminating design errors, minimizing constraints, simplifying tolerance stackups and creating designs which are robust to variation in process outputs and operating environments.

This course includes a number of practical exercises where you get to analyze and optimize different mechanical designs to improve simplicity and robustness of mechanical designs.

Target group

This course is relevant for anyone involved in R&D, product development or design, and for everyone who is interested in making systems more robust to variation in components, and thereby allowing larger tolerance windows on component specifications.

You can also apply some of the techniques covered in this module to e.g. mechanical process design. We welcome anyone seeking to increase end-product robustness.

If you are participating in a Six Sigma Black Belt course, this module will be voluntary. The covered tools are useful if you are working on a R&D or product development related Six Sigma project.

Your benefits

After participating in this course, you will be able to:

• Calculate degrees of freedom for mechanical designs
• Reduce complexity of tolerance chains for mechanical problems
• Reduce ambiguities in mechanical designs
• Determine where in-depth calculations are necessary or can be omitted
• Analyze and optimize mechanical designs for robustness to variation

The course involves theoretical and practical exercises in both design evaluation and subsequent optimization where you will get hands-on experience with the techniques. The techniques taught can be applied to a device design, but will to a certain extend be applicable to other disciplines such as process robustness.

• Degrees of freedom
• Minimum constraints design
• Detailed interface analysis
• Evaluating design robustness
• Reducing ambiguity in mechanical designs