Improve your operations and your bottom line
If something is working, and has been for years, it’s a lot easier to look the other way and not think twice about it. But if your goal is to improve your operations and your bottom line, while recording these efforts as part of your ISO 9001 continual improvement program, you’ve come to the right place. We can help you!
Design Optimization
Manufacturing composite products can be tricky. The geometry of the various composite layers must be just right for all the properties to be optimal. We do this using the following techniques:
- Analysis of cross-sections
- Thickness adjustment with manufacturing in mind
- Rounding some corners to avoid stress concentrations
- Studying how to demold without any issues (parting lines and draft angles)
- Using Computer Aided Design (CAD, AutoCAD, Solidworks, Inventor, SketchUP)
Material Optimization
We know all there is to know about the following materials and we will recommend the ones you need to optimize your product or process:
- Proposing alternate materials – all possible ones to suit your requirements including thermoplastic composites
- Glass fiber: E-Glass, S-Glass, C-Glass, R-Glass, ECR Glass, Hiper-Tex, Advantex and Quartz
- Carbon fibers (also known as graphite fibers): There are dozens of carbon fiber types. We will tell you which one fits your needs
- Basalt fiber
- Resins: Polyester, vinylester, epoxy and polyurethane are only a few of the choices available. Let’s discuss your application to choose the right one!
- Core materials: Honeycomb, balsa and foam cores of all types
- Prepregs
- Bill of Material (BOM): let’s take a look and make sure it’s optimal!
Manufacturing Process Optimization
To improve and optimize a manufacturing process, we investigate your current use of:
- Equipment: presses, resin pumps, RTM pumps, light RTM equipments and others
- Molds: materials, configurations, countermolds, re-tooling, RTM, vacuum, and others
- Tools: cutting tools, templates, jigs, drilling equipments and others.
- Methods: spray-up, winder, chopper, hand lay-up, liquid molding, (RTM, VARTM, LRTM, CCBM, infusion, RIM/SRIM, cold press), compression molding (BMC, SMC, TMC, stamping), other closed molding (prepregs and vacuum bag, autoclave or out of autoclave molding “OOA”), continuous process (pultrusion, filament winding)
- QA/QC program in place
Product Optimization
To improve and optimize the materials used in the manufacturing of your composite product, we use several techniques:
- FEM / FEA (using FEMAP, Nx Nastran, Autodesk Nastran In-CAD, ANSYS, Solidworks or others tools)
- Determining the actual mechanical properties of the laminate
- Proposing alternate design (laminate sequences)
- Calculating all stress issues including the buckling factor to reduce the weight, stress analysis and other exciting predictive engineering factors
Cost Optimization
Does it make sense to go ahead with this project? You need to know both your costs and your ROI. We can do this analysis for you. The following tend to be the most popular options among our customer:
- Full business case (especially for a new design or process/product optimization)
- Material costing
- Waste reduction savings
- Automation & robots – cost of implementation
- Labor cost savings
Conversion from metal to composites
Composites are now replacing metal as a raw material for several applications and in various industries. If you currently have a metal product and would like to know whether it can be converted to composites, see our design page.