CATIA V5 provides Areva Challenge Design Team with a unique capability to address the full composites process

14 July 2006

With the new partnership of Dassault Systèmes, the 32nd America’s Cup French Team will demonstrate once again that it is a powerful platform for bringing together first-rate French companies and leveraging their knowledge of technology and project management.

The difficulty and engineering complexity the ACC (America’s Cup Class) designers are facing is not really in the general layout or the interior design, but much more in the optimization of complex composite structures. As a matter of fact, to improve the boat’s performances and keep the best stability with respect to structure stress, composites elements are key factors of success.

Dassault Systèmes’ flagship software, CATIA V5, provides Areva Challenge Design Team with a unique capability to address the full composites process (from modeling to manufacturing and Finite Element Analysis) from the same application, user interface and data model. What would normally require several software, data transfer and conversion (and most of the time data loss!) or surfaces healing is managed by the only CATIA V5. This advanced and powerful associativity allows Areva Challenge to achieve composites modeling, meshing and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in CATIA V5. This is a great advantage in terms of productivity, but also in exploring many design alternatives.

Areva Challenge Design Team are using the following CATIA modules to perform their digital mock-up:

• CATIA Mechanical Design package: creation of the parametric skeleton model of the complete boat including the hull structure with bulkheads, reinforcements, etc.

• CATIA Composites Engineering: application of the composite scantling on the geometry zone by zone, including inserts and local reinforcements.

• CATIA FEM Surface, CATIA - Elfini Structural Analysis: creation of the meshing (associative to the geometry), and automatic transfer of the composites properties to the meshing

• CATIA Generative Part Structural Analysis: FEA computation using CATIA V5 Elfini solver, including orthotropic materials calculations.

The analysis results allow the Design Team to refine their 3D model while remaining in the virtual world (no prototype!). Adjusting parameters and performing the analysis loop are made easy, intuitive and efficient with CATIA V5.