Introduction

Polymer composites have been in use for a few decades now. Their advantages over other materials for high-performance, lightweight applications have attracted many industries such as aerospace, automobile, infrastructure, sports and marine to explore and increase their usage. The path to the design and manufacturing of composite structures was pursued in evolutionary as well as revolutionary ways. They ranged from using hand layup with labor and cost intensive autoclave processing to the use of automated processes such as injection molding and extrusion, traditionally employed by the polymer processing industry. Many new manufacturing techniques were invented and introduced during the last two decades, and some of them were incrementally improved to increase the yield of manufactured composite parts. The process engineer has relied on experience and “trial and error” approaches to improve the manufacturability of a prototype. Very little analysis of process physics and back-of-the-envelope calculations were done to approach a prototype development of a composite structure. Even the choice of the process was dictated by familiarity and experience rather than appropriateness and methodology. This has proved to be very expensive. However, in the last few decades the composites manufacturing industry has come under intense pressure to be cost-effective and focus on cost avoidance in prototype development. Design and manufacturing engineers have resorted to use of process modeling and simulations to address some of these concerns. The virtues of virtual manufacturing are becoming more obvious to the manufacturing engineer when formulating the guidelines and methodology for the design and manufacturing of composites.