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22-Mec-B5 Product Design and Development: December 2018

Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)

  1. Question 1 Improving the functional and non-functional aspects of a product
  2. Question 2 The engineer and the artist as designers
  3. Question 3 Factors that limit a design, and how to overcome them
  4. Question 4 Protecting and commercializing an invention
  5. Question 5 Designing a new product versus refining an existing one
  6. Question 6 Communicating a design to the manufacturing team
  7. Question 7 Design for Manufacturing and Assembly

Start with Question 1 →

Paper format. National Exams, December 2018 — 16-Mec-B5 Product Design and Development. Three hours; OPEN BOOK; an approved Casio or Sharp calculator is permitted. Question 1 is compulsory and carries 40 marks; four of the six remaining questions are attempted at 15 marks each, for a total of 100 marks. The paper prints 40 + 6 × 15 = 130 marks against the 100 that are attempted. All seven questions are solved here. Most questions call for an essay answer or the use of tables, figures and charts, and clarity and organisation of the answer are explicitly marked.

Reference texts for 22-Mec-B5 Product Design and Development. K. T. Ulrich and S. D. Eppinger, Product Design and Development (the framework text for this syllabus); G. E. Dieter and L. C. Schmidt, Engineering Design; G. Pahl and W. Beitz, Engineering Design: A Systematic Approach; G. Boothroyd, P. Dewhurst and W. Knight, Product Design for Manufacture and Assembly; M. F. Ashby, Materials Selection in Mechanical Design; S. Kalpakjian and S. R. Schmid, Manufacturing Engineering and Technology; R. G. Cooper, Winning at New Products. Canadian context is taken from CSA Z412 Office Ergonomics, CSA B651 Accessible Design for the Built Environment, ANSI/BIFMA X5.1 General-Purpose Office Chairs, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office guides, and the Engineers and Geoscientists BC Code of Ethics.

How this paper is answered. Every question on this sitting is descriptive, so the answers are written as engineering prose. Where a claim can be settled with a number rather than asserted — how many people a chair actually fits, how many stations a line needs, whether a warranty improvement is real, which assembly route is cheapest — the calculation is set out with its Given and Find so the reasoning can be checked. That is a deliberate exam tactic as well as good practice: this paper explicitly rewards "the use of tables, figures and charts", and a quantified assertion is the hardest kind to argue with.