MULTIDISCIPLINARY PARAMETRIC DESIGN OPTIMIZATION FOR ENHANCING THE AFFORDABILITY OF MOLDED COMPOSITES

The role of design optimization in assisting design decision-making an d enhancing the affordability of composite products is studied in this paper. The design of composite products that meet performance, manufa cturability, and cost requirements is a multidisciplinary problem. Sol utions to appropriately formulated design optimization problems can as sist in quickly examining several design alternatives at early concept ual design and parametric design stages. However, the candidate design s require manufacturing process, structural and material performance, and product cost evaluations. These evaluations are often conducted by several domain experts using sophisticated and diverse numerical anal ysis tools. The formulation of constraint and objective functions in m ultiple domains, the use of numerical model-based evaluation of the fu nctions, and the solution of multidisciplinary optimization problems d uring the design of injection molded plastics are addressed in this pa per. Numerical examples are presented illustrating the application of optimization techniques in process and exploring material alternatives as well as in parametric design of geometry with affordable cost obje ctives. A brief description of a software system developed to systemat ically integrate optimization with the domain-dependent knowledge and geometric design is also presented.