Assessment of low-cost manufacturing process sequences
The Low-Cost Solar Array Project, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, is managing an extensive research and development activity to reduce the cost of manufacturing photovoltaic solar arrays by a factor of approximately one hundred. This management objective implies the need for a capability to relate proposed and actual manufacturing process descriptions to manufacturing costs. The Solar Array Manufacturing Industry Costing Standards (SAMICS) methodology was developed to meet this need. An overview of this methodology is presented. Since the solar array manufacturing industry is expected to increase in capacity by several orders of magnitude when the price is reduced to a competitive level, it would be inappropriate to assume that indirect costs will be the same multiple of direct costs as is presently observed in the industry. Furthermore, identification of some other industry as similar would be highly questionable. Consequently, SAMICS contains a factory construction and staffing algorithm, which infers indirect requirements from the specified direct requirements and implicitly builds a hypothetical, dedicated factory for performing the specified manufacturing processes. SAMICS has been implemented by a computer program (SAMIS III). It has been applied to the assessment of Low-Cost Solar Array Project progress, and it has been used as a tool in the selection of research and development priorities.
- Research Organization:
- Jet Propulsion Lab., Pasadena, CA (USA)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Solar Energy
- DOE Contract Number:
- EX-76-A-29-1012
- OSTI ID:
- 6220508
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-790451-1
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 3. European congress on operations research, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 9 Apr 1979
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Recent developments in the economic modeling of photovoltaic module manufacturing
Normative price for a manufactured product: the SAMICS methodology. Volume I. Executive summary. [Solar array manufacturing industry costing standards]
Related Subjects
SOLAR CELL ARRAYS
MANUFACTURING
ALGORITHMS
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
COST
ECONOMIC ANALYSIS
EVALUATION
MARKET
SIMULATION
SOLAR CELLS
DIRECT ENERGY CONVERTERS
ECONOMICS
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
PHOTOELECTRIC CELLS
PHOTOVOLTAIC CELLS
PHOTOVOLTAIC POWER PLANTS
POWER PLANTS
SOLAR POWER PLANTS
140501* - Solar Energy Conversion- Photovoltaic Conversion