Title: Improved human-computer interaction for mechanical systems design through augmented strain/stress visualisation

Authors: Frank Naets; Francesco Cosco; Wim Desmet

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Abstract: It is difficult to obtain realistic stress and strain estimates for mechanical designs due to unknown operational conditions, input forces and/or parameters. This limits a designer in evaluating whether a certain product meets all design specifications. This work presents an extended Kalman filter to obtain accurate strain and stress estimates of a structure under operational loading. An augmented reality application allows visualisation of these strains and stresses on a real component. This leads to an effective human-computer interface to evaluate a physical prototype. The developed approach exploits parametric reduced order models based on high fidelity finite-element design models to obtain an efficient formulation. This paradigm is validated on a flexible beam with unknown input forces and length. The proposed approach permits a more natural visualisation and interpretation of operational conditions. Our results encourage the adoption of this approach in applications ranging from design validation to online monitoring of structural components.

Keywords: augmented reality; mechanical systems design; strain estimation; stress estimation; Kalman filter; human-computer interaction; HCI; mechanical design; visualisation; prototype evaluation; finite element method; FEM; modelling; flexible beams.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIEI.2017.082565

International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, 2017 Vol.5 No.1, pp.50 - 66

Received: 14 Feb 2015
Accepted: 31 Dec 2015
Published online: 01 Mar 2017 *

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