It is widely acknowledged that decisions made in the early design stages have a greater influence on the final product than those made in the later stages. In a conventional design process, composite products are designed without sufficient consideration being given to limitations of composite manufacturing process. Quite often some of composite designs cannot be produced with special performance requirement or cannot be produced at a reasonable cost. To resolve this drawback and achieve the competitive designs for composite product, an integrated knowledge framework that supports the quantitative manufacturability evaluation of composite design proposals was introduced. The essential concept of the composite manufacturability was defined through an in-depth analysis of composite manufacturing process. The evaluation flow was acquired according to the hierarchical indices. A stage-based quality assessment model for the composite multistage process was mainly studies. It relies on the consideration that the final quality of a composite product is mainly determined by some critical stages during a production cycle. Finally, the method is illustrated through a case focusing on the quality issue of void formation in autoclave process.

Manufacturability calculation of product’s design proposal often plays a vital role in many engineering applications, which is critical to achieve reduced time to market, high quality, and low cost. A methodology for the manufacturability evaluation of composite material components during preliminary stage of design is introduced and applied for the thermosetting composite laminated components produced by autoclave process in this article. The proposed methodology relies on the consideration that the component’s quality is a decisive index in the manufacturability evaluation of composite products. First, according to the analysis of composite product manufacturing processes, the concept of composite product manufacturability was proposed in this article. Second, the knowledge-based manufacturability evaluation flow is acquired based on the hierarchical indices setup of composite product manufacturability. Then, we mainly studied assessment model of composite product quality controllability: the quality controllability of composite product and its influencing factors were discussed. In addition, the quality controllability assessment model proposed was carried out step by step through the characteristic of multi-procedure in the production of composite product. In the end, an example of composite laminate component was provided to demonstrate the proposed model for evaluating the manufacturability.

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