Computer Applications in Engineering Education Published Our Paper on CAD Research

Fig. 1: Integrated design and simulation in Energy3D

In workplaces, engineering design is supported by contemporary computer-aided design (CAD) tools capable of virtual prototyping — a full-cycle process to explore the structure, function, and cost of a complete product on the computer using modeling and simulation techniques before it is actually built. In classrooms, such software tools allow students to take on a design task without regard to the expense, hazard, and scale of the challenge. Whether it is a test that takes too long to run, a process that happens too fast to follow, a structure that no classroom can fit, or a field that no naked eye can see, students can always design a computer model to simulate, explore, and imagine how it may work in the real world. Modeling and simulation can thereby push the envelope of engineering education to cover much broader fields and engage many more students, especially for underserved communities that are not privileged to have access to expensive hardware in advanced engineering laboratories. CAD tools that are equipped with such modeling and simulation capabilities provide viable platforms for teaching and learning engineering design, because a significant part of design thinking is abstract and generic, can be learned through designing computer models that work in cyberspace, and is transferable to real-world situations.

Some researchers, however, cautioned that using CAD tools in engineering practices and education could result in negative side effects, such as circumscribed thinking, premature fixation, and bounded ideation, which undermine design creativity and erode existing culture. To put the issues in a perspective, these downsides probably exist in any type of tools — computer-based or not — to various extents, as all tools inevitably have their own strengths and weaknesses. As a matter of fact, the development history of CAD tools can be viewed as a progress of breaking through their own limitations and engendering new possibilities that could not have been achieved before. To do justice to the innovative community of CAD developers and researchers at large, we believe it is time to revisit these issues and investigate how modern CAD tools can address previously identified weaknesses. This was the reason that motivated us to publish a paper in Computer Applications in Engineering Education to expound our points of view and supporting them with research findings.

Fig. 2: Sample student work presented in the paper

The view that CAD is “great for execution, not for learning” might be true for the kind of CAD tools that were developed primarily for creating 2D/3D computer drawings for manufacturing or construction. That view, however, largely overlooks three advancements of CAD technologies:

1) System integration that facilitates formative feedback: Based on fundamental principles in science, the modeling and simulation capabilities seamlessly integrated within CAD tools can be used to analyze the function of a structure being designed and evaluate the quality of a design choice within a single piece of software (Figure 1). This differs dramatically from the conventional workflow through complicated tool chaining of solid modeling tools, pre-processors, solvers, and post-processors that requires users to master quite a variety of tools for performing different tasks or tackling different problems in order to design a virtual prototype successfully. Although the needs for many tools and even collaborators with different specialties can be addressed in the workplace using sophisticated methodologies such as 4D CAD that incorporate time or schedule-related information into a design process, it is hardly possible to orchestrate such complex operations in schools. In education, cumbersome tool switching ought to be eliminated — whenever and wherever possible and appropriate — to simplify the design process, reduce cognitive load, and shorten the time for getting formative feedback about a design idea. Being able to get rapid feedback about an idea enables students to learn about the meaning of a design parameter and its connections to others quickly by making frequent inquiries about it within the software. The accelerated feedback loop can spur iterative cycles at all levels of engineering design, which are fundamental to design ideation, exploration, and optimization. We have reported strong classroom evidence that this kind of integrated design environment can narrow the so-called “design-science gap,” empowering students to learn science through design and, in turn, apply science to design. 

2) Machine learning that generates designer information: For engineering education research, a major advantage of moving a design project to a CAD platform is that fine-grained process data (e.g., actions and artifacts), can be logged continuously and sorted automatically behind the scenes while students are trying to solve design challenges. This data mining technique can be used to monitor, characterize, or predict an individual student’s behavior and performance and even collaborative behavior in a team. The mined results can then be used to compile adaptive feedback to students, create infographic dashboards for teachers, or develop intelligent agents to assist design. The development of this kind of intelligence for a piece of CAD software to “get to know the user” is not only increasingly feasible, but also increasingly necessary if the software is to become future-proof. It is clear that deep learning from big data is largely responsible for many exciting recent advancements in science and technology and has continued to draw extensive research interest. Science ran a special issue on artificial intelligence (AI) in July 2015 and, only two years later, the magazine found itself in the position of having to catch up with another special issue. For the engineering discipline, CAD tools represent a possible means to gather user data of comparable magnitudes for developing AI of similar significance. In an earlier paper, we have explained why the process data logged by CAD software possess all the 4V characteristic features — volume, velocity, variety, and veracity — of big data as defined by IBM. 

3) Computational design that mitigates design fixation: In trying to solve a new problem, people tend to resort to their existing knowledge and experiences. While prior knowledge and experiences are important to learning according to theories such as constructivism and knowledge integration, they could also blind designers to new possibilities, a phenomenon known as design fixation. In the context of engineering education, design fixation can be caused by the perception or preconception of design subjects, the examples given to illustrate design principles, and students’ own previous designs. As it may adversely affect engineering learning to a similar degree as “cookbook labs” underrepresent science learning, design fixation may pose a central challenge to engineering education (though it has not been thoroughly evaluated among young learners in secondary schools). Emerging computational design capabilities of innovative CAD tools based on algorithmic generation and parametric modeling can suggest design permutations and variations interactively and evolutionarily, equivalent to teaming students up with virtual teammates capable of helping them explore new territories in the solution space.

To read more about this paper, click here to go to the publisher's website.

Maine Teacher Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Education

In June 10-12, we hosted a successful teacher professional development workshop in York, Maine for 29 teachers from seven states. The theme was around the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in engineering education to assist teaching and foster learning. The workshop was supported by generous funding from General Motors and the National Science Foundation.

The teachers explored how the AI tools built in Energy3D could help students learn STEM concepts and skills required by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), especially engineering design. Together we brainstormed how AI applications such as generative design might change their teaching. We believed that AI could transform STEM education from the following four aspects: (1) augment students with tools that accelerate problem solving, thereby supporting them to explore more broadly; (2) identify cognitive gaps between students' current knowledge and the learning goals, thereby enabling them to learn more deeply; (3) suggest alternative solutions beyond students' current work, thereby spurring them to think more creatively; and (4) assess students' performance by computing the distances between their solutions and the optimal ones, thereby providing formative feedback during the design process. The activities that the teachers tried were situated in the context of building science and solar engineering, facilitated by our Solarize Your World Curriculum. We presented examples that demonstrated the affordances of AI for supporting learning and teaching along the above four directions, especially in engineering design (which is highly open-ended). Teachers first learned how to design a solar farm in the conventional way and then learned how to accomplish the same task in the AI way, which -- in theory -- can lead to broader exploration, deeper understanding, better solutions, and faster feedback.

View my PowerPoint slides for more information.

Generative Design of Concentrated Solar Power Towers

In a sense, design is about choosing parameters. All the parameters available for adjustment form the basis of the multi-dimensional solution space. The ranges within which the parameters are allowed to change, often due to constraints, sets the volume of the feasible region of the solution space where the designer is supposed to work. Parametric design is, to some extent, a way to convert design processes or subprocesses into algorithms for varying the parameters in order to automatically generate a variety of designs. Once such algorithms are established, users can easily create new designs by tweaking parameters without having to repeat the entire process manually. The reliance on computer algorithms to manipulate design elements is called parametricism in modern architecture.

Parametricism allows people to use a computer to generate a lot of designs for evaluation, comparison, and selection. If the choice of the parameters is driven by a genetic algorithm, then the computer will also be able to spontaneously evolve the designs towards one or more objectives. In this article, I use the design of the heliostat field of a concentrated solar power tower as an example to illustrate how this type of generative design may be used to search for optimal designs in engineering practice. As always, I recorded a screencast video that used the daily total output of such a power plant on June 22 as the objective function to speed up the calculation. The evaluation and ranking of different solutions in the real world must use the annual output or profit as the objective function. For the purpose of demonstration, the simulations that I have run for writing this article were all based on a rather coarse grid (only four points per heliostat) and a pretty large time step (only once per hour for solar radiation calculation). In real-world applications, a much more fine-grained grid and a much smaller time step should be used to increase the accuracy of the calculation of the objective function.

Video: The animation of a generative design process of a heliostat field on an area of 75m×75m for a hypothetical solar power tower in Phoenix, AZ.

Figure 1: A parametric model of the sunflower.

Heliostat fields can take many forms (the radial stagger layout with different heliostat packing density in multiple zones seems to be the dominant one). One of my earlier (and naïve) attempts was to treat the coordinates of every heliostat as parameters and use genetic algorithms to find optimal coordinates. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this approach. In reality, however, the algorithm tends to generate a lot of heliostat layouts that appear to be random distributions (later on, I realized that the problem is as challenging as protein folding if you know what it is -- when there are a lot of heliostats, there are just too many local optima that can easily trap a genetic algorithm to the extent that it would probably never find the global optimum within the computational time frame that we can imagine). While a "messy" layout might in fact generate more electricity than a "neat" one, it is highly unlikely that a serious engineer would recommend such a solution and a serious manager would approve it, especially for large projects that cost hundreds of million of dollars to construct. For one thing, a seemingly stochastic distribution would not present the beauty of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility through the lens of the famed photographers like Jamey Stillings.

In this article, I chose a biomimetic pattern proposed by Noone, Torrilhon, and Mitsos in 2012 based on Fermat's spiral as the template. The Fermat spiral can be expressed as a simple parametric equation, which in its discrete form has two parameters: a divergence parameter β that specifies the angle the next point should rotate and a radial parameter b that specifies how far the point should be away from the origin, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2: Possible heliostat field patterns based on Fermat's spiral.

When β = 137.508° (the so-called golden angle), we arrive at Vogel's model that shows the pattern of florets like the ones we see in sunflowers and daisies (Figure 1). Before using a genetic algorithm, I first explored the design possibilities manually by using the spiral layout manager I wrote for Energy3D. Figure 2 shows some of the interesting patterns I came up with that appear to be sufficiently distinct. These patterns may give us some ideas about the solution space.

Figure 3: Standard genetic algorithm result.

Figure 4: Micro genetic algorithm result.

Then I used the standard genetic algorithm to find a viable solution. In this study, I allowed only four parameters to change: the divergence parameter β, the width and height of the heliostats (which affect the radial parameter b), and the radial expansion ratio (the degree to which the radial distance of the next heliostat should be relative to that of the current one in order to evaluate how much the packing density of the heliostats should decrease with respect to the distance from the tower). Figure 3 shows the result after evaluating 200 different patterns, which seems to have converged to the sunflower pattern. The corresponding divergence parameter β was found to be 139.215°, the size of the heliostats to be 4.63m×3.16m, and the radial expansion ratio to be 0.0003. Note that the difference between β and the golden angle cannot be used alone as the criterion to judge the resemblance of the pattern to the sunflower pattern as the distribution also depends on the size of the heliostat, which affects the parameter b.

I also tried the micro genetic algorithm. Figure 4 shows the best result after evaluating 200 patterns, which looks quite similar to Figure 3 but performs slightly less. The corresponding divergence parameter β was found to be 132.600°, the size of the heliostats to be 4.56m×3.17m, and the radial expansion ratio to be 0.00033.

In conclusion, genetic algorithms seem to be able to generate Fermat spiral patterns that resemble the sunflower pattern, judged from the looks of the final patterns.