Topic: Mechanical & Industrial Engineering
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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 HyperQ/PP uses HyperCard and Prolog to implement the proposed methodology.
Recent developments in materials technology have brought many exciting changes to the field of engineering design. In particular, advances in materials and processing techniques for engineering thermoplastics offer tremendous opportunities in various products. Engineers can benefit from wider freedom in geometry, reduced weight, lower cost, and so on. Unfortunately, most engineers do not have a good understanding of how to design for these materials and do not utilize their full potential. In this light, one of the most important task for engineers is process selection at the early stages of design.
In a traditional design process that targets metals to be machined, engineers start from the component specification, develop a geometry design, and proceed to process planning. However, for engineering plastics, the selection of the processing method places strong constraints on the geometry which designers should use to achieve various functions. Engineers cannot simply convert the geometry for metals to engineering plastics. Some plastic processes can readily produce certain classes of geometry, but it may be very costly, or even impossible, to realize other classes of geometry. Moreover, some processes may be totally incompatible with certain materials. Together with the selection of materials, process selection becomes a very important decision before engineers proceed to the design of detailed geometry. This challenge also applies to advanced materials other than engineering plastics such as composites.
Source: mml.stanford.edu
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