Concept design optimisation for Continuously Variable Transmissions

The intense competition on the global markets faced by manufacturing companies is reflected by critical issues like decreasing the product-development-cycle, lowering costs and increasing quality. This can be viewed as a multi-criteria decision-making problem set within the space of engineering-characteristics for the designed system. In this paper one aspect of a design method: Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is used to assess different design concepts for transmission systems and explore the relationship between the most important features for the system definition in specific applications. Various concepts are assessed, whilst dimensions of individual components of a novel CVT are optimised to meet the derived requirements.