Our group felt that it would be best to complete a functional decomposition of the battery case before trying to create a morphological chart.  The reason being, that many of the categories on the morphological chart can be taken directly from the function decomposition.  In addition, we felt that creating a function decomposition of the battery pack was essential in getting the group to think of the correct characteristics and possibilities to consider when filling in the morphological chart.  Unfortunately, we ran into some very large time set backs creating the functional decomposition.  Instead of only decomposing the battery case based on the functions the case must perform, we took many of our branches a step further by listing the physical alternatives to provide the linked function.  While this created some initial confusion among the group, it had a positive effect on the design process.  It resulted in the group thinking of more in-depth physical solutions to the functions that the case must perform.  For example, as a function of the battery case we stated that it must protect the internals from contaminant infiltration.  We then went on to define two types of seals that we could use (physical elements).  One was a permanent weather stripping, the other was a system that required a silicon seal to be applied every time the case was opened.  Both of these physical solutions are valuable to this design because the weather stripping is a more user friendly feature, while a permanent seal that was re-applied each time the case was sealed may be more effective, especially since the case should not need to be opened very often.

Since we believe that all of the work that we did on our morphological was valuable to our design, we went through and highlighted the physical decomposition elements in yellow.  The functional decomposition elements are in white.

Although we did not have a competing product to benchmark in Task 6, we can see that completing Tasks 6 and 7 iteratively would lead to the most complete results.  Benchmarking the other designs on a function and sub-function basis will help the team come up with the functions/sub-functions that we would need to include in our design.  In addition, as the morphological chart for our product is being created, we may think of a function or sub-function for our design that would be worth benchmarking against the competition.

Functional Decomposition

Morphological Chart

Continue to Conclusion - Part A