Bridging the Gap Between CAD and CAE in Composite Structures Development Process for the Automotive Industry

Abstract

Composite materials demonstrate significant advantages such as weight saving potential, increased strength and larger design flexibility, but these are combined with significant design restrictions and considerations. In order to exploit the most composite materials potential, cost and time effective design, analysis and manufacturing processes are required. Composite materials, specially the fibber reinforced laminated composites, are increasingly becoming attractive to the Automotive Industry due to their properties. The existing practices for the design, analysis and manufacturing, previously used in other industrial sectors, are proved insufficient for complex composite structures, intended for massive production, in affordable cost for the consumer. In order to reach the required performance characteristics, the Automotive Industry, needs to establish new design processes and deploy software tools that facilitate them. This applies not only to CAD, but also to CAE analysis and simulation that already plays an important role to the upfront design. Consequently, innovative methods and tools are also required for the CAE pre-processing, analysis and post-processing, of complex, large scale product models of composite materials. Moreover, bridging the gap between CAD and CAE, with specialized data handling solutions emerges as a challenge. The aim of this work is to highlight the Automotive Industry’s requirements for the improvement of the design and analysis methodologies for the development of composite material parts and complex structures and to showcase offered solutions. New software tools for the modelling, simulation and analysis of the behaviour of fibber reinforced laminated composites, which have been developed and integrated into the complete pre- and post-processing environments of ANSA and μEΤΑ software, are presented. The deployment of these software tools within the industry’s processes is demonstrated. The bridging of the gap between CAD and CAE is examined with cases of interfacing between software tools oriented to the design of composite materials parts with the CAE pre- and post-processors. The emerging conclusion is that significant time and cost reduction can be achieved by the introduction of efficient and smart CAE software tools and methods, which effectively stream and process the composite materials parts design data towards the products behaviour simulation and further more downstream to the comprehensive results study for preemptive decision making.