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The United States now spends approximately $115 billion annually to perform its metal removal tasks using conventional machining technology. Of this total amount, about $14 billion is invested in the aerospace and associated industries. It becomes clear that metal removal technology is a very important candidate for rigorous investigation looking toward improvement of productivity within the manufacturing system. To aid in this endeavor, work has begun to establish a new scientific and technical base that will provide principles upon which manufacturing decisions may be based. One of the metal removal areas that has the potential for great economic advantages is high-speed machining and related technology. This text is concerned with discussions of ways in which high-speed machining systems can solve immediate problems of profiling, pocketing, slotting, sculpturing, facing, turning, drilling, and thin-walled sectioning. Benefits to many existing programs are provided by aiding in solving a current management production problem, that of efficiently removing large volumes of metal by chip removal. The injection of new high-rate metal removal techniques into conventional production procedures, which have remained basically unchanged for a century, presents a formidable systems problem, both technically and man agerially.The proper solution requires a sophisticated, difficult process whereby management-worker relationships are reassessed, age-old machine deSigns reevaluated, and a new vista of product/process planning and design admitted.

The Fourth Conference on Fibrous Composites in Structural Design was a successor to the First-to-Third Conferences on Fibrous Composites in Flight Vehicle Design sponsored by the Air Force (First and Second Conferences, September 1973 and May 1974) and by NASA (Third Conference, November 1975) which were aimed at focusing national attention on flight vehicle applications of a new class of fiber reinforced materials, the advanced com posites, which afforded weight savings and other advantages which had not been previously available. The Fourth Conference, held at San Diego, California, 14-17 November 1978, was the fi rst of these conferences to be jointly sponsored by the Army, Navy and Ai r Force together with NASA, as well as being the first to give attention to non-aerospace applications of fiber reinforced composites. While the design technology for aerospace applications has reached a state of relative maturity, other areas of application such as mi litary bridging, flywheel energy storage systems, ship and surface vessel components and ground vehicle components are in an early stage of development, and it was an important objective to pinpoint where careful attention to structural design was needed in such applications to achfeve maximum structural performance payoff together with a high level of reliability and attractive economics.