Evolutionary Design Method And Its Application

The thesis mainly studies Evolutionary Design method and its application to the conceptual design for mechanisms.For so many years, we aim to design the products intelligently and automatically, and improve the innovation levels. However, because most of traditional design methods depend on experiences of designers, which take too long designing cycle and lack creativity, they cannot meet these demands in any case. Fortunately, the evolutionary algorithms developed in 1990's have been proved an effective approach to solve this problem.Evolutionary design method is originated from bionics, which represents solutions as individuals, and seeks the optimal solution by simulating the evolving process of survival of the fittest in nature. The evolution method is based on the theory of evolution algorithm and evolution thinking with self-organization, self-adaptation and characteristics of parallelism and global. Currently, evolutionary design method has been applied to the fields of structural optimization design, conceptual design, artificial design and intelligent robot design, and many remarkable progresses are achieved.The research about the evolution design methods in recent years is mostly in abroad. However, the systematic theory and method are still not derived, which needs us to study further. On the basis of collecting and analyzing a great quantity of references at home and abroad, this thesis studied the basic principle of evolution design and its implement method, and its application to the conceptual design for mechanisms.The main works in the thesis are as follows:(1) The evolution design methods are overviewed and analyzed, which include the research progress, intension, types and realization means. The neural network evolution model applied to behavior control is also be discussed.(2) Based on the Lipson's evolution design method, the specific realization means are studied, at last, the example about mechanism evolution design is given.(3) Taking the design of piezoelectric micro-gripper for an example, based on analyzing its transmission mechanism, deducing the simplifiedformulas for transmission analysis and validating by finite element analysis and experimental measurement, the structural parameters are optimized by evolution algorithm.Adopting evolution method to design mechanical products will be beneficial to improve automaticity, innovation and broaden designer's mind. Therefore, doing research for this method is of great value.