What’s Necessary to Design a Manufacturing Friendly Composite Product
Too many engineers working with composites make designs without the manufacturing process in mind, according to Henry Czenczek of FRP Engineering. “They don’t get on the floor and see what’s really going on and whether their design is really possible,” he says. “What are the limitations? What are the possibilities behind the designs?”
Czenczek plans to tackle this problem in a Composites 2010 education session titled What’s Necessary to Design a Manufacturing Friendly Composite Product. “What I’m going to be talking about is systematic approach to product design,” he says. “I hope that people step back and actually spend some time thinking about building a product as opposed to focusing on the mold shape, throwing it on the floor, guessing at what laminate to use and arriving at a solution through trial and error.”
The first step to product design is conducting a thorough customer-needs analysis. “This is a formal process,” he says. “The informal process is talking to a customer, jotting down a few notes, then going to the design stage. The formal process is writing down your discussions, so I’ll write down the question I asked, the response the customer made and the interpreted need. Once I’ve got this down on paper, I can send this to the customer and verify that my understanding is correct, because so many times assumptions are made and they’re wrong assumptions.”
Subsequent steps include modeling the geometry, presenting the part to downstream manufacturers or end users, cost estimation and tooling. During the process, Czenczek also encourages a manufacturing review that involves gathering feedback from process experts. “Those process experts are everybody from the plant manager to the guy whose job is to gel coat all day long,” he says. “I consider him or her a process expert because if they’re doing it eight hours a day, every day, no one is going to know more about it than they do.”
