Proceedings of the 9th
International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology
(September 1997), ASME.
Abstract
An analysis tool to aid in preliminary design of re-entry aeroshells for
interplanetary exploration is presented. The computational tool
addresses a common feature of design analysis, the need to make use of
results from several analysis regimes and from several sources.
This paper formalizes for computation what has historically been a matter
of informal engineering judgment. The automation of
design analysis allows for more extensive search of the design space,
and thus supports a design process that is at once more thorough and
more efficient.
The human designer uses experience and intuition to combine results
from different analyses. Here, this combination is formalized by
recognizing that each analysis tool is valid in particular regimes of
the design problem; where regimes overlap, a combination based
on participation factors (and utilizing the mathematics of fuzzy sets)
is employed.
An aggregated level of confidence for each solution point is also
calculated.