ASSESSING THE AFFORDABILITY OF EMERGING PROCESSES FOR ADVANCED MATERIALS

Quality-cost modeling is a method for obtaining approximate yet quanti tative information regarding the potential of emerging manufacturing p rocesses to produce high-quality, cost-competitive advanced materials. The modeling method is based on the concept of an affordability space -a set of reachable combinations of cost and performance (quality) uni que to a particular process and material. The analysis relies on the d evelopment of relatively simple (first order) models intended to captu re the essential interactions between the material and its processing environment and their use in calculating the final microstructure (on which a quality index is based) and the associated cost. Both cost and quality are functions of the starting state of the material, process conditions used, and the design of the process. The tool allows numeri cal experiments to be conducted in which the influence of these variab les on cost and quality can be explored.