Enumerating the Component Space: First Steps Toward a Design Naming Convention for Mechanical Parts

A standard naming convention for mechanical parts is proposed in this paper. We refer to this naming convention as the component basis. The component basis is a first step at classifying an exhaustive list of human-made mechanical transmission artifacts as functional forms, geometric shapes, simple machines, and natural forms. The proposed component basis provides a framework for the development of a suite of computational conceptual design tools. This suite of design tools includes a function-based computational concept generator and a product evolution methodology.