No description available.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

No description available.

No description available.

This project has led to the development of a text "An Introduction to Mechanical Drawing" and slide series for this text, which will be used in combination to teach mechanical drawing to Junior High School students and a basic approach to drawing for any interested person.The text is written in a teachable sequence. That is, each chapter develops a particular segment of mechanical drawing, which is added to and built upon by each successive chapter.A preliminary stage setting to mechanical drawing for the students is developed through the use of the slide series.

The problem of this study is to determine what types of tests are being used in mechanical drawing by the high school teachers of Texas and to suggest ways in which testing in mechanical drawing may be improved.

The purposes of this study were to determine the relations of mechanical drawing to other courses taught in the junior high schools of the North Texas area and to propose an outline for a course of study in junior high school mechanical drawing that will have a high relationship with other courses.

The problem of the study was a comparison of the relative effectiveness of two approaches to the teaching of engineering drafting.

The efficiency of the mechanical design process can be improved by the use of evolutionary algorithms. Evolutionary algorithms provide a convenient and robust method to search for appropriate design solutions. Difficult non-linear problems are often encountered during the mechanical engineering design process. Solutions to these problems often involve computationally-intensive simulations. Evolutionary algorithms tuned to work with a small number of solution iterations can be used to automate the search for optimal solutions to these problems. An evolutionary algorithm was designed to give reliable results after a few thousand iterations; additionally the scalability and the ease of application to varied problems were considered. Convergence velocity of the algorithm was improved considerably by altering the mutation-based parameters in the algorithm. Much of this performance gain can be attributed to making the magnitude of the mutation and the minimum mutation rates self-adaptive. Three motorsport based design problems were simulated and the evolutionary algorithm was applied to search for appropriate solutions. The first two, a racing-line generator and a suspension kinematics simulation, were investigated to highlight properties of the evolutionary algorithm: reliability; solution representation; determining variable/performance relationships; and multiple objectives were discussed. The last of these problems was the lap-time simulation of a Formula SAE vehicle. This problem was solved with 32 variables, including a number of major conceptual differences. The solution to this optimisation was found to be significantly better than the 2004 UWA Motorsport vehicle, which finished 2nd in the 2005 US competition. A simulated comparison showed the optimised vehicle would score 62 more points (out of 675) in the dynamic events of the Formula SAE competition. Notably the optimised vehicle had a different conceptual design to the actual UWA vehicle. These results can be used to improve the design of future Formula SAE vehicles. The evolutionary algorithm developed here can be used as an automated search procedure for problems where performance solutions are computationally intensive.

The sketching software developed in this thesis, is aimed to serve as an intelligent design tool for the conceptual design stage of the mechanical design process. This sketching software, Sketch Pad for Windows, closely mimics the traditional paper-and-pencil sketching environment by allowing the user to sketch freely on the computer screen using a mouse. The recognition algorithm built into the application replaces the sketch stroke with the exact CAD entity. Currently, the recognition of two-dimensional design primitives such as lines, circles and arcs has been addressed. Since manufacturing requires that the design concepts be detailed, sketches need to be refined as detailed drawings. This process of carrying design data from the conceptual design stage into the detail designing stage is achieved with the help of a convertor that converts the sketch data into DesignView (a variational CAD software). Currently, only geometrical information is transferred from the sketching software into DesignView. The transparent graphical user interface built into this sketching system challenges the hierarchial and regimental user interface built into current CAD software. / Graduation date: 1995