SBIR-STTR Award

The amount of information about joining composite materials is large and poorly standardized, making it difficult for the materials engineering to make optimum design decisions. A computerized composite joining information system is needed to help the design engineer synthesize the available knowledge in a useful and productive way. One solution to this problem is the development of a combined expert and database system of composite joining information. Such a system will help the engineer by screening the available information for what is optimally applicable to a particular joining situation or question. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of a complete system, a prototype expert system for composite joining procedures will be developed. This expert system will be integrated with an existing personal computer (PC) database system of composite materials, adhesives, procedures and computer-aided-design (CAD) drawings.

Construction of any large composite material structure can require many hundreds of feet of joining. Whenever the joining process can be streamlined, automated, or optimized to produce the best properties, tremendous cost savings can be obtained. The development of JOINEXCELL (a blackboard system for offline intelligent planning for joining composite materials) is planned as a multiyear effort involving a partnership of government, industry, university research, and technology transfer. The project, both as an internal R&D effort and as a Phase I SBIR effort, has already generated new concepts with potential for future spinoff benefits. The ultimate payback in productivity will be large for the American joining, fabrication, manufacturing, and construction industries in general. This proposal discusses the overall JOINEXCELL concept, the Phase I feasibility study, and the proposed Phase II effort. The Technology Service Company, Incorporated (TTSC) doing business as the American Joining Institute (AJI), has begun developing an intelligent joining process planner for flexible fabrication of composite materials known as the JOINing EXpert manufacturing CELL (JOINEXCELL). The JOINEXCELL project will entail the development of a series of linked expert systems acting as a joining engineer's assistant and software to download joining procedures from the joining planner to a simulated shop floor workcell for automatic execution of the planned joints. The heart of JOINEXCELL is a computer architecture which uses a simulated blackboard acting as an intelligent controller. This architecture will be simply referred to as a blackboard in the remainder of the proposal. This blackboard system allows the interconnection of multiple expert systems and databases with a central goal, which is to carry out intelligent planning for the joining of composite materials. The Phase I SBIR effort was designed to show the feasibility of such a system by developing prototype software. The software produced, JOINADSELECTOR, was an expert system for adhesive selection for composite material joints.