Increasing the Manufacturing Robustness of Complex Composite Geometries by Modeling the Process Variability due to the Human

The influence of variability in the manufacturing process (deposition, debulk and bagging) on the incoming state of a part to cure poorly understood. Manufacturing spec requirements are based more on historical decisions than science, and specific process guidance is relatively tribal.  This combined with normal variations in human integrated processes results in poorly characterized variation and a poor understanding of the correlation of this variation to outcomes of interest (part quality). Building on the work in Phase I, Convergent Manufacturing Technologies US (CMT-US) proposes to characterize typical sources of variability in manufacturing and develop a suite of simulation tools to support modeling variance in pre-cure stages and their influence on the final part. Characterization will include typical ranges for attributes which are susceptible to human variation such as ply deposition with hand layup, debulk time, and pleating (position, angle, efficiency, etc.). The proposed tools include 1) a high-fidelity simulation 2) a fast-app and 3) a surrogate model. The objective of Phase II is to advance the research and development efforts from Phase I into a more mature integrated system which can be used to improve the robustness of the manufacturing design process and provide sensitivity analysis, uncertainty quantification, and risk assessment for the manufacturing design stages. With these tools and workflows, users shall be able to analyze the risks in final part quality including porosity and geometric conformity associated with human variation in the precure manufacturing processes of deposition, debulk, and bagging and identify the parameters for which a process is most sensitive and thereby perform optimization.