An activity-based-parametric hybrid cost model to estimate the unit cost of a novel gas turbine component

The first tool presented in this paper is a generic factory cost model that can estimate various costs at multiple levels of any manufacturing plant. The model is activity‐based which means that the cost of each manufacturing operation is calculated and then summed up so that the true £‐per‐hour factory cost rate as well as the exact unit cost (i.e. manufacturing cost) of an unlimited number of different components can be estimated. The second tool is a scalable cost model that estimates the unit cost of future integrally bladed disc (blisk) designs which are used by the aerospace industry in gas turbine compressors. The tool multiplies the machine cost rates, calculated by the factory cost model, by the operation times derived from blisk scaling rules. As the operation times often depend on the number of blades, the disc diameter and other design variables, many scaling rules are based on the correlation between operation times and certain design parameters. Conversely, the remaining process times are constant because they are independent of the blisk geometry. As future process times can only be estimated and the correlation between operation times and design parameters is never perfect, all operation times have uncertainty distributions. These are cascaded through the model to generate a probability distribution of the unit cost. Through the interactive exchange of detailed cost information at the manufacturing operation level as well as extrapolated operation times, the two cost models facilitate design and manufacturing engineering to concurrently optimise blisk designs and manufacturing processes in terms of cost.