Concurrent engineering of products made of composite materials

When developing the products made of composite materials, particularly for spacecrafts and aircrafts, it is necessary to consider and evaluate already at the early stage all possible design decisions including alternative variants of materials used, structural and technological variants. The proposed technology of concurrent engineering when implemented as computer software allows to shorten essentially the design process and synthesize high-quality and competitive technical decisions of both constructional design and manufacturing technology of composite products. Generation of alternative constructional- technological decisions is substantiated by the mathematical methods of morphological analysis and synthesis. The very synthesis is carried out on the basis of decomposition of the composite product in line its functional description. So called "use" and "pay for use" functions are introduced for selecting the preferable decisions in the formes! range of synthesized alternative decisions. The above methodology was tested for developing such composite products as cryogenic pipelines and three-layered panels of solar batteries for spacecrafts. The corresponding computer-aided systems are developed.