ABSTRACT
Engineering design starts with identifying customer requirements and developing the most promising conceptual product architecture to satisfy the need at hand (Chap. 2). This stage is often followed with a finer decision making process on issues such as product modularity as well as initial parametric design of the product, including its subassemblies and parts (Chaps. 3 and 4). The concluding phase of design is engineering analysis and prototyping facilitated through the use of computing software tools. Engineering students spend the majority of their time during their undergraduate education in preparation for carrying engineering analysis tasks for this phase of design, for example, ranging from mechanical stress analysis to heat transfer and fluid flow analyses in the mechanical engineering field. Students are taught many analytical tools for solving closed-form engineering analysis problems as well as numerical techniques for solving problems that lack closed-form solution models. They are, however, often reminded that the analysis of most engineering products requires approximate solutions and furthermore frequently need physical prototyping and testing under real operating conditions owing to our inability to model analytically all physical phenomena.
