A system modelling methodology for materials and engineering systems design integration

This paper presents a system modelling methodology to support the integration between materials design (including materials selection) and engineering systems design at the early design stage. It consists of a generic framework to develop the relationships between the required system performances and their related system loadings and attributes, where the attributes include both the structural attributes of an engineering system (thus for engineering systems design) and the material properties (thus for materials design and selection). This is achieved by modelling the system behaviours and the relevant material behaviours, and identifying the dependencies between the relevant design variables. The variable dependencies can then be used to solve various design problems, such as design evaluation, evaluation and optimisation of critical design variables, and robust design of controllable design variables. A design case study is also conducted to illustrate the proposed system modelling methodology as well as to demonstrate its applicability and usefulness.