Research on functional design of mechatronics product based on functional ontology

Conceptual design is an early stage of the whole mechatronics product development process, which involves the generation of solutions to satisfy the design requirements. Conceptual design includes three stages: functional design, principle conceptual design and structure conceptual design. And Functional design is the important part of product´s conceptual design. It is a crucial issue how to help designers to find proper functions and their function structure to meet design requirements. This paper proposes a functional design methodology based on functional ontology in mechatronics product design, which can be used to design innovative mechatronics products. The design of a separator machine is given as an example, which demonstrates that the methodology is obviously useful.