Abstract: With the increasing expansion of application areas and improvement of in-service performance, there is an urgent need for high-end equipment in the fields such as aerospace and aeronautics, energy and power, information and electronics. It is extremely difficult to manufacture these high-end equipment, not only due to their multiple and higher requirements such as loading, transmission, conduction, energy conversion and stealth, but also due to their complex structures, difficult-to-cut materials, and high requirements in surface integrity and/or precision. High performance manufacturing (HPM) is an inevitable choice to address the above mentioned challenges and break the bottleneck of high-end equipment manufacturing. Starting with the characteristics of parts/components/devices, manufacturing requirements and the state-of-the-art manufacturing technologies, this paper clarifies the connotation of HPM, the key issues to be addressed, and the quantitative correlation between design and manufacturing. Subsequently, the general framework and the generalized model of HPM is proposed, and the fundamental elements and criteria are laid out and discussed. Finally, the realization solutions and the key technologies are highlighted with two case studies. It is pointed out that HPM is not only a kind of precision manufacturing and computational manufacturing with the correlation modeling of multi-parameter in design, manufacturing, and service as the core, but also performance-geometry-integrated manufacturing aiming at the precise guarantee of ultimate performance.

Key words: high performance manufacturing, precision manufacturing, manufacturing mode, predictive modeling, simulation-based optimization