National Exams, May 2015 — 07-Mec-B5 Product Design and Development. Three hours. Open book; no calculator is 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. The paper states that most questions require an answer in essay format or the use of tables, figures and charts, and that clarity and organisation of the answer are important.
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 marking scheme printed on the last source page splits Question 1 as 6 / 9 / 9 / 6 / 4 / 6 and gives the part weights for each 15-mark question, and the answers here are proportioned to that split. Because no calculator is allowed, every calculation is arranged so that it can be carried out on paper in one or two lines.
Reference texts for this subject
- K. T. Ulrich and S. D. Eppinger, Product Design and Development — the framework text for this exam code: identifying customer needs, target specifications, concept generation, concept selection by Pugh screening and weighted scoring, design for manufacturing, and product development economics.
- G. E. Dieter and L. C. Schmidt, Engineering Design — problem definition, decision matrices, design for the environment and life-cycle assessment, standards and codes, and the four components of a complete design.
- 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 — part-count reduction, handling and insertion time, and the design-for-assembly index used in Question 6.
- M. F. Ashby, Materials Selection in Mechanical Design — translate, screen, rank and seek supporting information; the property charts and material indices used in Question 7.
- S. Kalpakjian and S. R. Schmid, Manufacturing Engineering and Technology — process selection, process capability, tooling cost and economic batch size.
- I. Gibson, D. Rosen and B. Stucker, Additive Manufacturing Technologies — process families and design for additive manufacturing, for Question 2.
- W. Preiser and K. Smith (eds.), Universal Design Handbook, and the seven Principles of Universal Design (Centre for Universal Design, North Carolina State University, 1997) — the framework Question 1 asks for.
- Canadian context: CSA B125.3, Plumbing fittings; CSA B651, Accessible design for the built environment; the National Plumbing Code of Canada; the Accessible Canada Act framework; CSA Group, Standards Council of Canada and Health Canada under the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act.
Check: the exam gives no data of its own — every question asks the candidate to bring a product, a set of numbers and a method. All quantities used below (operating torques, embodied energies, machine rates, process sigmas, material properties) are stated explicitly as design assumptions drawn from the reference texts and from Canadian standards, and each answer is written so that the method stands whatever numbers a marker would prefer.
