The challenge of composite manufacturing is to become more efficient and scale up to high volume applications. If we take an analogy with food, it may sound logical to think of fast food: standardised, mass production, constant quality. But actually, we should think much more as a master chef and follow his or her way of cooking. It may sound counter-intuitive, but I’ll explain you why.
Contrary to an amateur cook, a good chef knows exactly what she is doing – down to every detail. First of all, a chef knows her ingredients. When buying meat, she will visit the farmer and check what kind of grass the cows are eating, ensuring the best quality. In other words, she seeks transparency of the supply chain. Second, a good chef knows her equipment and tools. She has familiarised herself with every inch of her equipment, understands the heat transfer of the stove and pans, and knows the importance of cleaning the bowl before whisking the eggs.
Thirdly, a chef understands the underlying principles of cooking. Where amateur cooks just follow the recipe and are puzzled why a course one days works out and the next day it suddenly doesn’t, a master chef actually knows what happens with the chemistry when cooking the meat or baking a cake: she works knowledge-based. (Here is a great book that explains the chemistry of cooking, very helpful for us engineers!). Fourthly, a chef looks, tastes or feels so she knows what is happening and how to adjust where needed. She uses her human sensors and adapts the recipe where needed (warning, if you do, do it the right way!).
What makes a master chef
A chef has learned this all by years of experience. She has seen it all and probably also failed a lot during the years. She has harnessed all this learning into her exceptional skills. The result is that with local ingredients that are always changing, with menus and dishes that are frequently adjusted, she still manages to get constant output quality. That’s what makes a master chef.
The fast food approach of composites today
Fast food restaurants take a very different approach to cooking, aiming for an acceptable and above all constant output quality. Their cooks are often inexperienced with just a basic training. They follow standardised procedures using standardised ingredients. Product variation is limited and process boundaries are broad.
What we currently do in the composites industry is that we follow the fast food restaurant approach. We aim to ensure constant output quality for low cost, by fixing all the parameters that influence the quality. This is then called ‘qualified materials’ and ‘qualified processes’. But is this optimal, and do we really understand what we are doing?
The cost of standardising
That standardised approach might sound great, but it also has important drawbacks. The cost of standardising everything is not small. Take for example the expensive cleanrooms that are mandatory in processing prepreg materials with the purpose to fix the temperature and humidity. Or the cost of qualifying materials, which creates a huge lock-in and blocks innovation. Or all the testing that is done to double check materials and processes, without actually knowing what the impact on the quality of the end product is. We can do so much better! We should become more like a chef, but then in the form of digital manufacturing.
Become a digital chef
Like a chef, we need transparency of the supply chain. By knowing our ingredients we can improve and adapt the production process, thereby raising the quality and reducing scrap. Right now the supply chain in our industry is extremely non-transparent. While we receive a certificate of conformity, we don’t really know the ingredients, let alone its variations. While this is intended to protect intellectual property, it is not effective. Production companies downstream do a lot of testing to find the variations in quality which the material companies already know. A smarter business model would be to share full and rich digital files together with the materials. In the future these digital files will become more valuable than the material itself. It will save testing and can be used for adaptive process control.
That means we need to master and fully understand the underlying principles of the manufacturing process. If we understand those, we can put them in a model. Manufacturing simulation is very much the key to improvement. In the last decades, the composites industry has put a lot of effort in performance prediction of composites (will the product hold?). Now, material and process simulation is the next frontier to conquer. This will be a combination of physics-based modelling and advanced data analytics using machine learning.
The next frontier
To capture all the variations in equipment, environment and process settings, we need to use much more sensors during manufacturing. If we don’t know what is happening, it will be difficult to improve. By understanding how to affect the output quality, we can then move towards adaptive process control. That will be the big step-change in thinking: not standardised and fixed recipes but adaptive and knowledge-based. It will save cost and improve quality reliability as well as accelerate the innovation we so badly need.
So what do you think: do you want to become a digital master chef and do you know how to do that?
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