Interactive exploration of design variations

The digital exploration of design variations is a key procedure in the embodiment phase of engineering design, in order to efficiently develop optimal solutions. This procedure requires the combination of modeling and simulation capabilities, enabling the engineer to assess the physical and functional behaviors of the proposed solution. Nowadays, this procedure is performed by means of iterating between designers and analysts with their corresponding tools and demanding reciprocal understanding between them. This is nonetheless a very time consuming activity with the currently available tools and technology, even the advance Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems, which can cope with almost any modeling requirement and which presently provide direct connection (i.e. meshing) to analysis modules for models with limited complexity, cannot deal with the interactive exploration of design variations. Moreover, the promising isogeometric analysis, which aims to simulate 3D NURBS representations also requires special transformations (i.e. meshing), which do not allow for interactive exploration of design variations. On the other side, the Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) systems offering morphing support, are only able to explore restricted variations, since large variations or deformations of the model involves expensive remeshing processes. In order to overcome the above mentioned issues and to enable a fully interactive exploration of design variations within an analysis environment, we enhance the simulating model with a high level representation for interacting with semantic features rather than with single elements, we perform combined morphing techniques with local mesh modification for preserving the stability of the numerical model during large variations, and we decouple the storage of the linear system entries and the sequential matrixvector multiplication for getting the solution, in order to permit the update of local entries of the matrix representing the local mesh modifications without the need of a rebuild of the entire system. Our methodology allows the engineers to independently and interactively explore conceptual design variations without restrictions. Hence, the investigation and understanding of the influence of different design features can easily and fast be evaluated and the development of optimal solutions for the design requirements can closely be fulfilled.