High-performance manufacturing: The leap from “accuracy” to “performance”

The increasing demand for high-end equipment in crucial sectors—including aerospace, aeronautics, energy and electronics—poses significant manufacturing challenges. These challenges arise from high-level requirements for loading, transmission, conduction, energy conversion, and stealth, amplified by complex structures, hard-to-cut materials, and strict standards for surface integrity and precision. In response, High-Performance Manufacturing (HPM) has emerged as an essential solution.

Published in International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, Prof. Dongming Guo from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Dalian University of Technology highlights that HPM is not just a precision and computational manufacturing framework with a core focus on multiparameter correlation in design, manufacturing, and service environments. It also represents a performance-geometry-integrated manufacturing framework to accurately ensure optimal performance.

HPM advocates for a design and manufacturing approach based on scientific modeling, optimal calculation and design, and precise control. It proposes novel manufacturing principles and flows that prioritize systematic and accurate performance modeling throughout the manufacturing lifecycle. Guided by solid scientific foundations, HPM promotes breakthroughs in manufacturing technology through interdisciplinary system modeling, simulations and integration.

In HPM, critical manufacturing factors will be systematically considered in both design and manufacturing processes, and its design and manufacturing will constitute a collaborative unity of design for performance (DFP), design for manufacturing (DFM), and manufacturing for performance (MaFP).

This collaborative manufacturing approach, with MaFP at its core, facilitates deep integration of design and manufacturing, and optimizes the processes through new theories and methods. Specifically, by considering the overall performance of equipment or parts as the system-level objective, HPM leverages the internal correlation among parameters, such as material, structure, geometry, and process, as well as integrated multidisciplinary and multifield co-simulation. Through the processing of both static and dynamic manufacturing data flows, feedback can flow from manufacturing back to design, allowing parameters to be customized, adjusted, or redesigned to minimize performance deviations and meet HPM’s requirements.

The MaFP represents a closed-loop manufacturing mode that relies on the integration of design and manufacturing. This mode addresses challenges to achieving precise performance through the reverse manufacturing of process specifications and optimizing parameters under the constraint of modelling for performance (MoFP). This includes the correction machining method of quantitative localization based on the performance deviation test and process parameter inversion.

The rising demand for high-end equipment has positioned HPM as a transformative force in industrial and economic sectors, where conventional manufacturing often falls short of meeting the required standards and capacities. However, despite the significant breakthroughs in manufacturing specific high-performance components, research into comprehensive theoretical and technical frameworks of HPM is still developing, with many singular research points and technologies lacking breakthroughs, particularly in manufacturing concepts and processes.  

Looking ahead, research and development in the HPM field should remain anchored in practical applications, identify unique technical benefits, and establish innovative MoFP theories, design methodologies and technologies. Emphasis should be placed on synergizing design and manufacturing to create systematic solutions for process and equipment development.

HPM represents a novel scientific manufacturing paradigm centered around precise performance goals and theoretical modeling. As a quantitative, localized, and formulaic digitized manufacturing method driven by performance, achieving the full potential of HPM will require sustained, systematic, and in-depth research to build a robust and comprehensive HPM theoretical and technological foundation.

About IJEM:

International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing (IF: 16.1, consecutive 1st in the Engineering, Manufacturing category) is a new multidisciplinary and open-access and double anonymous peer-reviewed journal uniquely covering the full spectrum of extreme manufacturing.

The journal is devoted to publishing original articles and reviews of the highest quality and impact in the areas related to extreme manufacturing, ranging from fundamentals to process, measurement, and systems, as well as materials, structures, and devices with extreme functionalities.

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