Application of analytical hierarchy process for the determination of green polymeric-based composite manufacturing process

Design for manufacturing is essential before launching the manufacturing processes for bio-products, where various issues must be considered in advance. Manufacturing green composites involvs several technical issues that have to be considered. Such issues include; the uniformity of the fiber distributed inside the composites, the water absorption of both fiber and matrix, the thermal degradations and the weathering effect of fiber and matrix, the wettability of resin impregnated into the spaces between fibrils, and the breakage of fibers during the mixing stages within the manufacturing processes. Therefore, the final desired properties of the green composites in relation to the selections of right materials, pre-processing methods, and manufacturing processes are distinguishably important for developing more functional green products. Thus, this work addresses a multi-criteria decision-making model to determine the appropriate green polymeric-based composite manufacturing process properly. The model was built based upon the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) involving eleven (11) technical-economic conflicting evaluation criteria. The manufacturing alternatives for green composites were simultaneously evaluated regarding all the considered evaluations. The results have revealed that selecting the best manufacturing process is challenging to perform without a particular bias toward a specific method. However, the selection was straightforward using the presented model as most of the manufacturing methods were of high priority regarding a specific evaluation criterion, but with low priorities regarding others. The compression molding process is determined as the best choice based on the overall considered evaluation criteria. However, it was not regarding production characteristics and material type criteria. Resin transfer molding and filament winding were found close in their priorities regarding the model’s evaluation criteria. It was shown that both compression molding and filament winding were the best processes regarding the cost considerations with overall priorities of 14.2% and 8.5%, respectively. The robustness of the results for the constructed model was verified via sensitivity analysis to validate its reliability. It was revealed that no manufacturing alternative was dominant while an exaggerated deviation in the weights of the primary evaluation criteria has occurred.