Assessment of Composite Manufacturing Process Variation with the Help of a Process Model

Kurzfassung

Considering the rapidly growing composite materials industry due to the increasing demand for these components as well as the environmental challenges nowadays, this research project was performed to serve the development of environmentally friendly and cost efficient manufacturing methods through three researching approaches. The first approach was to review and understand the different manufacturing phases and technologies of the fiber reinforced composite materials. The second approach was to build an up-to-date and detailed database for the selected manufacturing processes. This was gathered from two main data resources; the related literatures and the laboratory experiments. After understanding the manufacturing process dimensions from the first achievement, and build the required data collection in the second achievement, the third approach was to construct a simulation model for the Life-Cycle Assessment and the Life-Cycle-Cost Analysis of the manufacturing process. From developing the capabilities of this virtual prototype to handle more than one manufacturing technology and scenario, this research project reached its culmination of these achievements by formulating the simulation tool of fiber reinforcement polymers manufacturing process. This tool represents the first simulation tool that specialized in the composite materials manufacturing process at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), whereas the gained results from the simulation tool analyze the different economical and ecological trends of the selected manufacturing methods and scenarios.