Thermal/acoustic trade-off design for consumer electronics in a distributed design environment

Today's market demand for smaller, more powerful consumer electronics poses a major challenge to the rapid design of products. In addition, the ability to perform strategic coordination amongst different stakeholders within the enterprise increasingly becomes an important criterion to enable global engineering. We begin the paper with an introduction to a typical design process involving distributed design teams In particular the process allows the thermal-acoustic design of cavities, i.e. air space inside the enclosure, in terms of flow rate and acoustic radiation resistance. Then we proceed with the investigation of an approach leveraging recent modelling technology to support such a process efficiently. The process makes use of the system modelling language (SysML.) as product description support and the Design Structure Matrix as an analytical design tool. We use the model and the DSM as a means to drive numerical simulation and perform trade-off studies. Simulation results show that performing trade-off study in the early system design phase leads to a potentially optimal module layout for the problem studied.