JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #41 - June 2008 - 36

FEATURE “Aeronautics” Compressing composite part development cycle and improving quality Concurrency is a critical part of successful product development. It enables engineering teams to work in different domains simultaneously while facilitating collaboration across disciplines, allowing multiple iterations and improved communication. This leads to reduced rework, shorter product development cycles, and more robust and higher quality manufactured products. implemented because of the work required to make the change. In particular, the benefits associated with refinement through optimization in the analysis phase are lost because time constraints require full transition to detailed design as early as possible. JOHAN GRAPE DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY, VISTAGY, INC. raditionally, composite part design has not lent itself to concurrent development due to both the lack of mechanisms enabling communication between engineering disciplines, and the high complexity of the designs. It has been virtually impossible to achieve effective collaboration across analysis, design and manufacturing because it is so difficult for people in one of these disciplines to develop any significant understanding of the constraints, requirements and concerns facing people in any of the other areas. T Similarly, the designer is unable to determine the impact of his design rules on the structural properties, resulting in quality degradation, insecurity and inefficiency. In modern structure and zone-based designs, these problems have resulted in weight problems due to a combination of over-specification and additional design details in which overall weight and performance impacts could not be known. At the heart of current efforts to improve collaboration between engineering disciplines is an attempt to expose CAD functionality and native geometry to the CAE system. There is significant evidence that the next productivity improvements are expected to arise from such cross-disciplinary tools. Historically, the intent, analysis, design rules, materials specification, etc., of composite parts have not been expressed natively in the CAD model, but instead communicated through drawings and supporting documents. This indicates that simple native geometry-related integration between CAD and CAE will not address the core problem, which is the communication of high-level information about the design between the disciplines. But the barriers that impede collaboration within the product design environment are starting to crumble. For instance, FiberSIM®, VISTAGY’s CAD-integrated composite engineering software, enables cross-disciplinary collaboration through the exchange of high-level composite design information that is highly relevant to the operators. These capabilities form the foundation of a much improved collaborative composite part development effort, allowing multiple iterations through the design stages, easy integration of changes, and opportunities to manage rapid, highly concurrent composite part development across analysis, design and manufacturing. Enhanced collaboration If you think of the composite part as a set of zones and drop-off transitions, the analyst is primarily concerned with the former, and the designer the latter. Considering the difficulty of expressing and maintaining these relationships in geometry, it makes sense to develop a composite design environment that expresses the design in these abstract terms. VISTAGY’s FiberSIM® has been developed with the input of the composites industry and its best practices, and new capabilities now allow much closer collaboration between the disciplines by communicating change at the metadata level. With a data model that encompasses a large section of the methodologies associated with Limited ability to respond to external input After the initial requirements of a composite product have been outlined and have gone through preliminary design, each discipline will tend to pursue the goals set out for their phase of the design. The ability to respond to changes or recommendations from outside is limited, largely due to time and resource constraints. In such an environment, there are very significant inefficiencies. A recommended modification may have a significant beneficial impact on the product with a very low level of risk, but still fail to be JEC Composites Magazine / No41 June 2008

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #41 - June 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #41 - June 2008