National Exams, May 2016 — 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 9 / 9 / 4 / 9 / 9 and gives the part weights for every 15-mark question; the answers here are proportioned to that split. Because no calculator is permitted, every calculation is arranged so that it can be carried out on paper in one or two lines — ratios of round numbers, never a logarithm that has to be evaluated.
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 and final specifications, concept generation and selection, design for manufacturing, and product development economics.
- G. E. Dieter and L. C. Schmidt, Engineering Design — problem definition, decision matrices, design for the environment, standards and codes, and reliability and robustness in 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 manual-versus-automated assembly comparison used in Question 2.
- M. F. Ashby, Materials Selection in Mechanical Design — translate, screen, rank and document; the material indices used in Question 7.
- S. Kalpakjian and S. R. Schmid, Manufacturing Engineering and Technology — the process routes and their tooling economics.
- Centre for Universal Design (North Carolina State University), The Principles of Universal Design, and CSA B651 Accessible design for the built environment — the accessibility framework and operating-force limits used in Question 1.
- M. J. Kirwan (ed.) is not required here; for Question 4 the Canadian statutory frame is the Patent Act, Industrial Design Act, Trade-marks Act and Copyright Act as administered by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO).
