The advent of new engineering materials such as high- temperature, high-strength metals and their alloys; ceramics; and composites necessitated the development of new manufacture processes as processing by conventional methods can be too expensive and/or difficult. The development of new processes requires knowledge of each of the processes with respect to their capabilities and limitaitons. Some of the sucessful processes used currently for processing difficult-to-process materials are hybrid in nature which involves a combination of two or more processes. This project deals with the development of a methodology for the identification of new manufacturing processes using the method of morphological analysis. It involves the development of two-dimensional matrices with the basic type of energy along one axis and the materials to be processed on the other. The boxes in the matrix will be filled in with the known unit operations. The gaps in the matrix represent potential new operations. Research in this area can lead to the development of new and innovative processing economically of both conventional and advanced materials.
