Computational Simulation of Composite Components and Products

MSC has the capability of analyzing structural components using both commercially available, and internally developed, special purpose computational software. MSC has experience using ABAQUS, DYNA3D, NASTRAN and ANSYS. These codes are robust, well documented, and can perform stability, static, or transient dynamic stress analysis, heat transfer, and fluid flow analyses. The disadvantage of these codes is that they are typically developed to analyze homogeneous materials, and require significant user input to simulate the more complex behaviors of multiphase composites.

Typical Flow of Materials Analysis Software

To augment the material modeling options in commercial analysis packages, MSC has fully integrated many of our proprietary materials analysis codes with the ABAQUS general-purpose finite element code and the explicit dynamics code LS-DYNA3D. Our composite material models are available for use with any of the two and three dimensional stress elements and load procedures in the finite element library. Constituent properties and reinforcement architecture are used to evaluate element material stiffness, thermal expansion and thermal conductivity during the analysis without manual data transfer. During the solution phase fiber and matrix properties, and orientation within the composite, are used to compute fiber and matrix stresses and strains, and thermal quantities for review and plotting. Furthermore, because these codes have been fully integrated with the structural analysis software we can perform the calculations necessary to relate local inelastic strains to composite behavior and analyze the general path-dependent, thermo-mechanical, load history response of elasto-plastic or elastic-brittle composite structures.

At MSC, the technology exists to design both composite materials and products simultaneously. This proven approach, where computational tools provide a fundamental understanding of the interactions between constituent behavior and the result properties of the composite material, has consistently produced cost-effective, efficient, reliable product designs.

MSC computer facilities include a mixed environment of PC's and UNIX-based workstations configured as a local area network. All processors communicate via Ethernet, support local terminals including a PC X-Window capability. MSC's computer network provides the computational resources to execute such commercially available software as ABAQUS®, DYNA3D®, and Mechanica® (Pro/E), the solid modelers PATRAN® and FEAMAP®, as well as a wide array of our own proprietary programs, created specifically for the analysis of multi-phase, laminate, multi-directional, woven, and particulate composites and composite structures. Other engineering support capabilities include drawing development using AUTOCAD® and Solid Works® for solid modeling.

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