Simultaneous design for manufacturing process selection of engineering plastics

This paper describes a methodology that helps designers select a manufacturing process for engineering plastics. For many advanced materials such as plastics, engineers must simultaneously select the material and its processing method while they develop the part geometry. Early comparison and determination of the manufacturing process will allow engineers to tailor the geometry to the selected process. The major challenge is to guide the engineers to a set of compatible processes early in the design process at which time some decision factors may still be uncertain. The proposed system uses the concept of design compatibility analysis to represent the suitability of candidate processes with respect to a given part specification. A prototype system called HyperQiPP uses Hypercard and Prolog to implement the proposed methodology.