Methodology for Evaluating Manufacturability of Composite Materials

It is widely acknowledged that decisions made in the early design stages have a greater influence on the final product than those made in the later stages. In a conventional design process, composite products are designed without sufficient consideration being given to limitations of composite manufacturing process. Quite often some of composite designs cannot be produced with special performance requirement or cannot be produced at a reasonable cost. To resolve this drawback and achieve the competitive designs for composite product, an integrated knowledge framework that supports the quantitative manufacturability evaluation of composite design proposals was introduced. The essential concept of the composite manufacturability was defined through an in-depth analysis of composite manufacturing process. The evaluation flow was acquired according to the hierarchical indices. A stage-based quality assessment model for the composite multistage process was mainly studies. It relies on the consideration that the final quality of a composite product is mainly determined by some critical stages during a production cycle. Finally, the method is illustrated through a case focusing on the quality issue of void formation in autoclave process.