Manufacturability analysis of composite component and its evaluation methodology

Abstract

Manufacturability calculation of product’s design proposal often plays a vital role in many engineering applications, which is critical to achieve reduced time to market, high quality, and low cost. A methodology for the manufacturability evaluation of composite material components during preliminary stage of design is introduced and applied for the thermosetting composite laminated components produced by autoclave process in this article. The proposed methodology relies on the consideration that the component’s quality is a decisive index in the manufacturability evaluation of composite products. First, according to the analysis of composite product manufacturing processes, the concept of composite product manufacturability was proposed in this article. Second, the knowledge-based manufacturability evaluation flow is acquired based on the hierarchical indices setup of composite product manufacturability. Then, we mainly studied assessment model of composite product quality controllability: the quality controllability of composite product and its influencing factors were discussed. In addition, the quality controllability assessment model proposed was carried out step by step through the characteristic of multi-procedure in the production of composite product. In the end, an example of composite laminate component was provided to demonstrate the proposed model for evaluating the manufacturability.