Advanced Manufacturing Series 1# - Carbon Fibre

Richard Stone, our Advanced Manufacturing expert, looks at the challenges facing manufacturers of advanced materials. 

The global carbon fibre market is set to boom with
 demand reaching 153,000 tonnes by 2020
up from 52,200 tonnes in 2012, according to
Global Business Intelligence (GBI) research. 

The start of a successful carbon fibre production facility starts in the dream and design phase and is supported by leading PLM and 3D modelling companies.  But once into production how do you ensure you achieve the required production efficiency - in allowing new products to market quicker and maintain your yield levels?

Gaining visibility of the production process and its characteristics is key, even though the parts may go through the processes and pass the in process quality checks -  you still find the final product is failing inspection.  

With the industry requiring a demand in capacity and new product introduction being able to solve the efficiency and yield challenges quickly is vital.

Using real-time software solutions to monitor the process with a manual and automated data collection solution facilitates the characterisation of the product and process characteristics.  Sounds simple. Well is actually it's very complicated if you don’t have access to some very effective product characterisation software that generates rules for you that understands the many complicated interrelationships between the material transformation and the process.

Operational Intelligence solutions do this and you don’t need an analytic expert - you need a process expert.  The process expert is able to simply see the chances of success by implementing production rules which can be monitored and acted on in real-time.