Generative design approach for product development

Abstract

Completely redesigning a product has allowed designers to think beyond their comfort zone and view the multiple alternatives of a design problem. A designer can only focus on a handful of iteration of a design during the product development phase. Despite many design approaches that have been already proposed, they are all time-consuming and tedious to meet a pool of proposed solutions. To address this problem, this is where the Generative Design Approach comes into play. Several fields have been using this approach to address the problem in the design process. Here, we have adopted the generative design approach to develop a guitar holder and going to talk about a Mechanical Design Problem and how it was addressed. The study provides a practical description of the generative workflow and the outcome of which is cast and tested as in the design parameter. The software used was Autodesk Fusion 360 where a Guitar Holder was taken into consideration for the design process. The Generative Design process incorporated the biomimetic approach considering factors such as appearance, cost and strength. Total Load of 60N normal to the faces were applied. Several materials including ABS, PLA, Brass, Bronze, and Aluminum were considered and several Manufacturing processes like 3D printing, Investment and Sand Casting and CNC machining were considered in the Initial Phase. The 3D printed model was used as pattern for Investment and sand Casting. The casting materials used were bronze and aluminum. Among all the alternatives, the 220 gm sand casted bronze guitar holder satisfied the vast pool of requirement for mass production in terms of aesthetics, economics and structural integrity.