integrated application within the simulation software. The advantage of that second option is a drastic reduction of the model size (in terms of number of elements) that is an important limitation of some of the existing software in the market. Indeed, whatever the meshing strategy used, lots of industrial cases, in the aeronautic or wind energy industry because of the size of the parts and in the automotive industry because of the geometrical details of the parts, will result in models of several hundred thousands of elements. Most of the software will not have the computing capacity to deal with such model size and thus will opt for an analysis by section instead of looking at the whole part. This section approach that is just a result of computing limitations has an impact on the accuracy of the results. Once the mesh is created, it will be used to simulate the curing process. The curing simulation is a thermo-chemical analysis to compute the temperature history as well as the degree of cure history in each location (each node) of the part. This simulation should consider the exothermic aspect of the curing process. Typical curing results obtained on a fuselage panel (mesh on figure 4) are represented on figure 5 and 6. Fig. 4: Solid mesh of a representative section of an aircraft fuselage panel for distortion analysis Fig. 5: Temperature contour resulting from the curing simulation displayed on a section of the fuselage panel Fig. 6: Temperature history (for one element of the model) during cure with a peak due to the exothermic reaction Green curve: imposed temperature on part surface; Red curve: computed temperature in a mid-plane location Fig. 7: Normal displacements computed during the distortion analysis of the fuselage panel with PAM-DISTORTION Fig. 8: Normal displacements computed during the distortion analysis with PAM-DISTORTION displayed on a section of the fuselage panel No88 April 2014 / jec composites magazine 69