JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #45 - November/December 2008 - 52

FEATURE “Automotive” Two weeks of analysis data transfer: achieved in two hours with 100% ply success rate ING Renault F1 Team engineers are under intense pressure to meet challenging deadlines each racing season when developing complex composite racing cars. The team must completely re-design, manufacture, analyze and test its cars in only sixteen weeks or risk stringent penalties from the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), or worse, the loss of an entire racing season. As a result, the team is constantly striving to reduce cycle times and eliminate errors to achieve a competitive edge. ply from PATRAN analysis software for manual interpretation and freehand modelling in the CAD system. This proved to be a difficult process that took up to two weeks to accomplish and an additional two weeks to “tidy up” the CAD geometry to get it in a usable form. This method forced designers to actually reconstruct ply lay-up data in the 3D CAD environment, thereby consuming valuable development time and only enabling an approximate re-creation of the FEA intended ply boundaries. IAN GODDARD, SENIOR CAE ENGINEER, ING RENAULT F1 TEAM ost early design work on many Formula One cars is based on analysis data compiled from aerodynamic wind tunnel testing, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and finite element analysis (FEA)/load testing. As a result of these tests and in an effort to create parts that are durable, crash-protective and meet all specifications, analysts have begun to create design data with FEA software by defining composite part thicknesses, boundaries, ply orientations and sequences. But to begin the detailed design process, all this critical engineering data must be transferred to the detailed design team as efficiently as possible so the plies can be recreated in computer-aided design (CAD) software based on the work that has already been accomplished. M It is no small task to efficiently transfer laminate configuration data from FEA analysis tools to detailed composite design and CAD software. Prior to finding a successful, fullyautomated approach, the ING ING Renault Formula One. Renault F1 Team used both a manual approach and a semi-automated approach with little success. Using the semi-automated approach, the FEA ply boundary and geometry data was imported into CATIA V5, ultimately appearing as a series of points and rough, jagged boundaries in the CAD software that would require considerable clean-up prior to being used by the design team. In an attempt to improve the manual approach, the team graduated to a semi-automated method that exported analysis lay-up files to a native CAD file. The result was a series of points and rough, jagged boundaries in the CAD software, which again required significant clean-up. In addition, the resulting single “whole chassis” data file was not usable in the detailed design phase, which requires individual Challenges in analysis data transfer The manual data transfer approach used printed views of each jec composites magazine / No45 November-December 2008
JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #45 - November/December 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #45 - November/December 2008
