CAREER: Integration of Product and Process Design for Short Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composites

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project plans to put design optimization and product and process simulation into the core of polymer composites processing research. The focus on the integration of the fundamentals of materials processing and design via a new, comprehensive framework is promising for both manufacturing education and product realization in polymer composites processing. Today's successful engineering organizations continue to make progress towards incorporating manufacturing demands during a product's design. It is unfortunate, however, that at a time when computer simulation has revolutionized the way new products emerge, designers continue to employ ad-hoc methods to ensure that a product accommodates its manufacturing process and vice versa. This research seeks a new approach that places product specifications and materials processing requirements on a common basis where product and process simulation and multidisciplinary design optimization methods are central. The focus is on short fiber reinforced thermoplastic products manufactured by the injection molding process where a product's structural performance is defined by it's fiber orientation, that is itself determined during production. Optimal designs will be computed based on mold filling simulation, fiber orientation prediction, and structural evaluation. Large-scale industrial products common to automotive design are to be considered. Additionally, this research recognizes the increased design emphasis in today's undergraduate engineering curriculum and will, therefore, study decision making through the merging of multidisciplinary design into the educational pedagogy. Educational activities include undergraduate and graduate instruction on multidisciplinary design, integration of computational design into student competitions, and an effort to make K-12 teachers more familiar with modern design methodologies.