Concept Design Trade-Offs Considering Performance Margins

Abstract

Multi-disciplinary optimization (MDO) methods have become mature as software applications have been developed and distributed in Nordic countries and elsewhere. Typically, engineers formulate concept design problems using multiple system-level responses to allow simultaneous optimization along a Pareto trade-off frontier. These tools make use of trade-off graphs depicting each design concept as a point in a scatter plot, to observe the frontier versus dominated solutions. Often lost is the practical design engineering considerations of the equipment components that compose the system. In particular, there are operational performance limits of the equipment components, usually expressed as sa..