Economic evaluation of alternative process chains for the large-scale manufacturing of metal-fibre laminates

摘要

Hybrid bending plates consisting of fibre-metal laminates (FML) facilitate an individual spring rate at constant component geometry for a wide variety of vehicles, sports equipment and prostheses. The spring rate of such a FML is adjusted by an alternating layer setup of the two materials. Based on the technological potential of hybrid bending plates, this paper evaluates and compares the production costs of hybrid bending plates against composite bending plates in different manufacturing scenarios. For this purpose, the manufacturing processes RTM and prepreg pressing are compared. Three applications scenarios (automotive, sports equipment and running prosthesis), each with different production volumes and number of variants serve the bases for the economic evaluation. The production costs of the resulting process chains are modeled based on the value stream method. While fibre-metal laminates cause reduced tooling costs in all assessed scenarios, higher material costs tend to overcompensate this effect. Material costs seem to have the biggest lever in reducing total costs. Further research hence may be undertaken to investigate the effect of an optimised FML layer structure on the material costs.