JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #67 - August/September 2011 - 61

composite part must include information sufficient to evaluate the producibility of the design to ensure that the design asspecified is manufacturable. This is because the composite part must be designed The above figure shows the FiberSIM User Interface and illustrates the complexity of the composite definition. The application tree in the for the kind of left hand column and shows a variety of methods for defining the manufacturing composite part. To the right is a list of layers that constitute the process (hand laycomposite design. FiberSIM captures information in a way that is up, tape placement, specialized to the needs of a composite design engineer. fibre placement, plies, cores, and other specialized RTM) that will be used to build it. materials. As such, their definitions Providing a capability for performing contain thousands of pieces of product automated manufacturing simulations information which must be created, ensures that quality and on-spec updated, and managed as part of the designs are released to manufacturing, airframe design-to-manufacturing solving major hurdles in getting to a process. higher level of quality in composite part development. This composite-related information must be captured in context with the Providing a window geometry to fully describe the elements So extending the CAD system to give of the composite part. Due to this the design engineer the capability to limitation, neither the CAD system nor understand the manufacturing the PLM system alone can fully consequences of available choices support the capability required for the becomes critical for this kind of design. creation of an effective composite definition. This definition must be delivered accurately and completely through multiple revisions of the design in order to build the airframe. The tasks necessary to define and communicate the composite definition are both tedious and complex, so creating the definition accurately and quickly requires using tools designed specifically for that purpose. Without the kind of automation provided by industry-specific tools, composite designs are rife with errors and very difficult to communicate to other systems. This degrades quality while simultaneously increasing the cost of manufacturing the product. For example, the definition of the

Enabling this kind of “window onto the manufacturing floor” requires a complete and highly structured set of data to describe the composite part definition. For each individual ply in a composite laminate, there are approximately 150 pieces of non-geometric information that go along with the geometric definition of a ply boundary curve on a surface. All of this information is necessary to support the design, analysis, and manufacturing processes associated with the part. Because so much of this information is used for other systems, it must be easily exported and managed externally in a way that is compatible with the CAD and PLM architecture. Since the CAD systems do not have the capability to handle this information in its native format, providing industry-specific composites capability can greatly aid in this work. CAD systems are essentially geometric modelling tools and the structure of the information that they capture is geared toward the creation of threedimensional representations of designs. And while they are quite sophisticated in these tasks, the very nature of how

Pictured above is a FiberSIM producibility result on a composite shear tie, a part of an airframe assembly. The FiberSIM User Interface is in the bottom right hand corner and shows the compositespecific functionality that is necessary to define the part. The blue curves represent fiber paths, which are part of the producibility evaluation. This specialized capability is found in neither in the CAD system nor the PLM system.

No67 August - September 2011 / jec composites magazine

Technology & Innovations

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #67 - August/September 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #67 - August/September 2011