Design and Manufacturing of Composites

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Design and manufacturing of composite material structures is becoming increasingly complex. In order to fabricate structures in a consistent, repeatable manner, there must be a combination of basic theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge about the parameters that might affect the processes needed to manufacture that structure. One needs to know "how to design parts better". In the current state-of-the-art, there are methods and existing models that govern many aspects of making a part, from basic design to final manufacturing. The purpose of this research program is to find a way to optimize and improve the design, analysis and manufacturing of composite material structures in order make better and more consistent parts. The models and software tools that exist are exclusively "stand-alone" tools that can help with only certain aspects of design or maybe they function for only one type of material. Take a composite manufacturing process such as Automated Fiber Placement as an example. The aerospace industry would like to make a large composite aircraft fuselage using the AFP process, but one has to deal with separate software tools for design, stress analysis, fiber placement and processing/curing. The overall design process for the most critical part of the aircraft is complicated. A more refined modeling tool should be able to combine or integrate the information gained from these separate tools in an optimized way. In addition, there are often other aspects which are specific to an application, and which may need to be considered (environmental effects, fatigue, vibration and damping as examples). Modeling and optimization tools developed in this research will be verified by extensive testing of composite structures using a variety of composite materials such as carbon, Kevlar, fiberglass and natural fiber materials. In summary, the purpose of this research is to integrate design methods for new and existing composite materials and to find efficient ways to optimize the design of structures using these materials. This research is also very beneficial from the standpoint of HQP training because industry needs competency in the areas of composites design and manufacturing.