Abstract

In recent years, applications of composite materials have had significant growth in many industrial sectors. Light weight and high mechanical properties of composites supported by efficient manufacturing technologies such as resin transfer molding (RTM) make them better alternatives to metal products in several applications. Cost analysis of composite manufacturing processes is important to increase their manufacturing competencies. Cost reduction of composite manufacturing processes offsets their high material cost drawback. Thus a competent manufacturing process, along with outstanding mechanical properties, makes composites desirable materials of choice. A comprehensive production cost analysis for a hypothetical but realistic RTM manufacturing line is performed in this research. An optimized plant configuration is determined based on production volumes, resource utilization and material handling policies. Three different cases are studied to show how cost per item and profit values of the production behave on different production levels. In the first case production of a single product is studied while in the second and third cases two different products are assumed to be produced utilizing common facilities. An algorithm is proposed to search for optimal combination of production volumes of different products utilizing the common preconfigured production system. Cost fluctuations on different production volumes are analyzed to identify different factors which might influence the cost