Development of an automatic design and optimization system for industrial silencers

Current computer-aided design (CAD) software tools focus on rapid production of computer models, which usually takes place after the product design is completed. The product design process, which has more significant influence on product life-cycle costs, is not fully supported. This work documents the development of an automatic design and optimization system for industrial silencers. The developed system greatly reduces the silencer design time from one day to a few minutes. Moreover, the system proves the feasibility of developing an open-architecture CAD system supported by design of experiment (DOE) based optimization methods to integrate product life-cycle considerations into the design. It is expected that the developed system can help the development of similar systems for other products. Through the development of this system, some further research issues are identified.