National Exams, May 2014 — 07-Mec-B5 Product Design
and Development. Three hours. Open book; no calculator permitted.
Question 1 must be completed and is worth 40 marks; four of the six remaining questions are
chosen, each worth 15 marks, for 100 marks in total. Only the first five questions as they
appear in the answer book are marked, and the paper states that most answers are expected in
essay form or as tables, figures and charts, with clarity and organisation carrying weight.
The paper prints 40 + 6 × 15 = 130 marks and a candidate attempts
40 + 4 × 15 = 100 of them. All seven questions are answered below, because
this set is a study resource rather than an examination script. The arithmetic that appears is
deliberately light — no calculator is allowed.
Reference texts for this subject
- K. T. Ulrich and S. D. Eppinger, Product Design and Development — the framework
text for this exam code: mission statement, customer needs, target specifications, concept
generation, concept selection (Pugh and weighted scoring), design for manufacturing.
- G. E. Dieter and L. C. Schmidt, Engineering Design — problem definition,
decision matrices, design for the environment, life-cycle costing.
- G. Pahl and W. Beitz, Engineering Design: A Systematic Approach — the systematic
conceptual/embodiment/detail sequence and function structures.
- G. Boothroyd, P. Dewhurst and W. Knight, Product Design for Manufacture and Assembly
— the design-for-assembly index, minimum part count and handling/insertion times.
- M. F. Ashby, Materials Selection in Mechanical Design — translate, screen, rank
by material index, seek supporting information; the property charts used in Question 7.
- S. Kalpakjian and S. R. Schmid, Manufacturing Engineering and Technology —
process capability, tooling cost and economic batch size.
- Canadian context: ISO 14040/14044 (life-cycle assessment), CAN/CSA-B651 Accessible design
for the built environment, CSA Group standards for waste containers, and the provincial
organics-diversion programmes that set the duty for Question 1.
