Elsevier

Materials & Design

Volume 19, Issues 5–6, 17 December 1998, Pages 205-215
Materials & Design

Manufacturing process selection in engineering design. Part 1: the role of process selection

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0261-3069(98)00038-7Get rights and content

Abstract

Whilst material selection methods are becoming mature, the selection of processes has been neglected — particularly after the preliminary design stages. This paper presents a view of current approaches to selection issues in engineering design with particular reference to process selection techniques. The need is highlighted for more focused selection techniques once a manufacturing task has been identified. A new methodology to aid the creation of task-based process selection procedures is outlined in Part 2 (A.M. Lovatt, H.R. Shercliff, J. Mater. Des., 19 (1998) 217–230).

Introduction

There is an increasing awareness that decisions about the choice of material and manufacturing process need to be made earlier in the design process, especially since the degree of complexity and range of options are continuously growing. With the increasing level of sophistication in both materials and processing, it is insufficient to rely on the received wisdom. In the future, with the drive to more agile manufacturing, just having the technology may well not be sufficient to provide a competitive advantage — the skill will increasingly be in recognising and managing the complexity of the decisions involved, and having the creativity to address them effectively.

A designer, then, needs a systematic, unbiased way of assessing the various material and manufacturing options available. With an ever increasing pressure to reduce time-to-market on products, there is a demand for these assessments to be performed reliably, repeatably and quickly. In order to address these demands, selection procedures are being developed that utilise a wide variety of techniques to help compare the large array of options available. Such procedures provide analytical and graphical methods for comparing processes and are generally implemented in software. Above all, a successful procedure should enhance, rather than suppress, the innate creativity of the design process.

Most of the academic work carried out in the field of selection for engineering design has focused on materials, whilst the work on processes is less well-developed — particularly when a material and process combination need to be chosen simultaneously.

This paper outlines some of the general selection issues found during engineering design and focuses on the particular issues associated with the selection of a manufacturing process.

Section snippets

Design decisions

The field of engineering design is broad in scope, taking in all aspects of product formation on the route from an initial idea to a realised item in the marketplace. As a result, there are many decisions that need to be taken, resulting in many types of selection problem. Whatever the type of problem, the aim is usually similar — to select the best way of fulfilling a set of requirements from the options available. Sometimes the selection criteria may be objective, for instance when they can

What is the `best' process?

For the purposes of selection, a rigorous definition of a `process' is not required. It is usually sufficient to consider a process to be a manufacturing step that alters the characteristics of one or more materials in some way, in order to produce or modify a component or components. By this measure, a large number of processes exist, at all levels of complexity and scale. To help rationalise the available options, manufacturing processes can be categorised in a number of ways; a

Summary

Many of the common issues occurring during selection in engineering design have been outlined, and the effect of some of the general influences have been discussed. It was shown that many of the engineering decisions that need to be taken will involve determining the shape of a component, the material that it is to be made from and the process that is to be used in its manufacture.

Approaches to helping to select a suitable manufacturing process have been shown to depend on the stage reached in

Conclusions

It has been shown that selection methods are required for all the levels of details found during the design process. Much of the academic work on process selection has focused on selection methods for use at the preliminary stages of design. Whilst this is advantageous for considering the widest range of potential solutions, a number of limitations become apparent if the same methods are applied later on in the design process. As a results, more focused approaches are required to improve

Sources of software

  • `CMS', `CPS' — Granta Design Ltd, CUED, Cambridge CB2 1PX.

  • `FuzzyMat' — Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, Grenoble, France.

  • `Prospect: The Wood Database' — OFI, Dept. of Plant Science, University of Oxford OX1 3RB.

  • `Woods of the World' — Tree Talk Inc., PO Box 426, 431 Pine Street, Burlington, VT 05402, USA.

  • `Talat: Training in aluminium application technologies' — Aluminium Training Partnership, Brussels.

  • `Megabytes on Copper' — Granta Design Ltd, CUED, Cambridge CB2 1PX.

  • `Catia' — IBM

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Mike Ashby, Yves Bréchet and John Ion for many fruitful discussions. Thanks are also due to Amal Esawi and David Bassetti for the use of their software. The original work for this project was funded by the EPSRC; further funding has been provided by the Koerber Foundation and the Newton Trust.

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