Related Resources: Design for Manufacturing

Concurrent Engineering For Composites

Engineering Applications and Design
Design for Manufacturing and Assembly

Concurrent Engineering For Composites
Final Report
VISTASP M. KARBHARI
DICK J. WILKINS
JOHN M. HENSHAW
180 pages

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Introduction:

During the last decade, the composites industry has faced increasing competition on a world wide basis. This has led to an increasing emphasis on the development of newer and improved materials and processes. As a result there is an increasing push from management to speed up the design of products and reduce the time to market. The intense competition prevalent has even been described as akin to countries being in a "product war" [Cooper, 1990]. Stimulated by this increased competition, newer technologies and changing markets, industries are responding to the competitive challenges by re-thinking their approach to product development and manufacturing, and are increasingly adopting Japanese and other tools and methods of management and quality control [Edmondson and Wheelwright, 1989]. Strategic planning has assumed a position of great importance with choices determining key success factors, dictating program continuation and shaping expectations for growth. Although composites have been used for aerospace applications for more than three decades, they have yet to achieve their full potential as materials of choice for the automotive and consumer industry. Nurtured by aerospace applications that initially emphasized high performance with little regard to cost, composites usage has increased in other areas, yet is hampered by process and fabrication economics and manufacturability issues ("we can design but can you build economically," syndrome). The chasm between design and manufacturing has often caused the material system that is a designers dream to be a manufacturers nightmare. The "data management" or communications gap between design and management has been pinpointed by many as the most difficult of chasms to be bridged in increasing the effectiveness of the product realization process.

1. Introduction
2. Design and the Design Process
3. The Coupled Environment for Composites.
4. A Facilitation Process 11
4.1 The Need 11
4.2 Total Quality Design 15
4.3 The critical Elements 20
5. Tools for Decision Support 28
5.1 Knowledge Representation 29
5.2 Decision Support Systems 33
5.3 The Current Electronic Environment 36
5.4 The Discriminator Stack 40
6. Case Studies 51
6.1 Utility of the Composites Manufacturing Guide.... 51
6.1a TGSM Wingform 51
6.1b RNT-5 Turbojet Engine 56
6.2 Quality Control 57
6.2a Use of Taguchi Methods 58
7. Summary and Conclusions 67
8. References 69
Appendix 1
Appendix 2:
Appendix 3:
The TQD Workbook
TQD User Manual
List of Technical Publications