The End-to-End and Fully Integrated Composite Design Solution

Date: 31/07/2006, By Laurent Delsart and Olivier Le Roy

CATIA V5 Composites Design is an advanced process centric solution that allows companies from the aerospace, automotive, shipbuilding and consumer goods industries, to reduce design and manufacturing time for complex composite parts.

Composite materials, like carbon fiber have intrinsic qualities that combine lightness, mechanical (rigidity as well as fatigue durability) and chemical strength (no corrosion) offering designers the ability to create and manufacture innovative shapes. Composite materials are increasingly used to develop high performance products since the cost of composite materials has decreased and manufacturing processes have evolved to enable mass production in all industries. Composite designers need dedicated tools to optimize their designs so as to fully benefit from the new possibilities offered by such materials.

CATIA V5 Composite design solution, developed in partnership with composite industry leaders, is already in use at major aircraft and helicopter manufacturers and suppliers, Formula 1 teams and yacht designers. “Using CATIA V5 Composites Solution significantly improved our engineering processes and almost doubled the productivity of our design staff,” said Antti Aho-Mantila, R&D Engineer at Patria Aerostructures Oy. It delivers tools to cover both the preliminary and detailed design phases while taking into account, even at the concept stage, the manufacturing requirements of a product. Thanks to powerful synchronization mechanisms CATIA V5 composite applications make it possible for engineering and manufacturing to efficiently collaborate throughout the product development process.

SPECIFICATION DRIVEN COMPOSITES DESIGN APPROACH

CATIA V5 composites applications form a process-centric solution for designing composite parts. It delivers all the tools needed to ensure compliance with best practices. Benefiting from CATIA’s experience in the high-tech composites domain and based on the latest V5 technologies, CATIA V5 Composites deliver a unique and intuitive, specificationdriven solution that helps users concentrate on the design, not on the tool. Designers can manage complex designs with multi-part geometries such as T-shaped parts, core stiffened parts, stiffeners more easily than with standard composites design applications.

INTEGRATING MANUFACTURING PARAMETERS EARLY IN THE DESIGN PROCESS

Detailed fiber simulation enables users to predict how composite materials will behave on complex surfaces. Users can visualize fiber orientations, predict manufacturing problems, such as wrinkles or bridges, and take corrective action in the initial stages of design, eliminating costly change orders and ensuring a production ready part. Fiber simulation is done directly on the CAD model to generate accurate flat patterns according to ply characteristics and fiber behavior. Optionally, composite designers can extend existing fiber simulation features with a proven layout technology, which is already widely used by composites engineers. It enables designers to perform advanced fiber simulations on the most complex parts, benefiting from 15 years of fiber simulation research, development and experience.

STRONG PARTNERSHIPS TO SUPPORT ALL MANUFACTURING PROCESSES

Thanks to Dassault Systèmes’ partnerships, CATIA V5 Composites applications offer a complete and integrated solution with major production systems. Airbus Cimpa, Magestic Systems Inc., ESI Group, and MTorres deliver a complete offering based on the V5 infrastructure that addresses all composite manufacturing techniques, ranging from nesting, cutting and tape laying programming, fiber placement automation, to Resin Transfer Molding (RTM). Cincinnati Lamb and Ingersoll, two major manufacturers of machines for composite tape laying and fiber placement, recently joined the CAAV5 adopter community to increase the support of composite machines. This makes it possible for any company, regardless of the manufacturing process or the macine provider, to use Composites Design. The CATIA V5 Composite Solution fully benefits from strong research investments in particular for the geometric modeler and will include in the future latest modeling technologies

Scalable CATIA V5 Composites portfolio

 Three applications make up the CATIA Composites solutions:

• CATIA - Composite Engineering 2 (CPE) - for preliminary and engineering detailed design

• CATIA - Composite Design for Manufacturing 2 (CPM) - for manufacturing detailed design 

• CATIA - Composite Design 3 (CPD) an all-in-one solution covering the complete design and manufacturing process.