Affordance-based performance scale-up associated with structural parameters for product design

Abstract Product scale-up design is critical in developing many of today’s products. The traditional scale-up design methods (TSDM) use an analytical approach or empirical similarity method, which may not meet the requirement of dimensionless parameters when designing complex products. We develop an affordance-based scale-up method for the complex product design. Requirements-performance and performance-structure affordance constraints are constructed to connect the requirements and the structure parts. Then, the main parts are extracted based on the affordance matrix, and the coupling matrix is constructed. Analyzing the structural characteristic model, the parameters are extracted for the three matrices used for the parameters design. Take an injection molding machine as an example, and the example demonstrates the feasibility and potential industrial impact on product development.