Plastics design: integrating TRIZ creativity and semantic knowledge portals

Polymers are substituting metallic alloys in every field of mechanical application; in plastics design the material properties affect designer’s choice more heavily than in other cases, but also available manufacturing technologies have a deep influence on the project. All of these considerations can be summarized in the concept that a wide knowledge of polymer behaviour and technology is required and that in plastics design a new approach should be used: so new design tools must be adopted, as creativity supporting software, integrated with the prototyping capabilities offered by computer-aided engineering systems, to guide the development of new solutions. The aim of this work is to show how the integration of modern design tools with creativity management techniques constitutes an effective procedure to enhance the capability of developing innovative products. In this paper the use of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) is proposed to approach the redesign of structural parts from metals to polymers. To supply the designer with all the information he/she may need in this activity, a knowledge portal based on semantic capabilities of modern text mining technology has been built: the design of a polymeric wheel is taken as the opportunity to show how these design tools can organize and conduct to realizable solutions. The integrated adoption of knowledge-based tools both for the conceptual design phase (TRIZ-based applications) and for the detailed design phase (Semantic Knowledge portal) has provided satisfactory results in terms of augmented creativity and design efficiency.