The role of design optimization in assisting design decision-making and enhancing the affordability of composite products is studied in this paper. The design of composite products that meet performance, manufacturability, and cost requirements is a multidisciplinary problem. Solutions to appropriately formulated design optimization problems can assist in quickly examining several design alternatives at early conceptual design and parametric design stages. However, the candidate designs require manufacturing process, structural and material performance, and product cost evaluations. These evaluations are often conducted by several domain experts using sophisticated and diverse numerical analysis tools. The formulation of constraint and objective functions in multiple domains, the use of numerical model-based evaluation of the functions, and the solution of multidisciplinary optimization problems during the design of injection molded plastics are addressed in this paper. Numerical examples are presented illustrating the application of optimization techniques in process and exploring material alternatives as well as in parametric design of geometry with affordable cost objectives. A brief description of a software system developed to systematically integrate optimization with the domain-dependent knowledge and geometric design is also presented.
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