JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #92 - October/November 2014 - 45

ite structures in an aircraft design
increases the complexity of the development process. This necessitates
changes and improvements to address
the added challenges of composites.
One area of improvement is the cultural adoption of quality principles by
key stakeholders in the new composite oriented process. This manifests
itself in the use of specialized composite design methods to assess in
the early stages of development if the
design is converging on the customer's required performance.
These specialized methods require
the use of specialized design tools,
which embed verification capability
into the process. Use of specialized
design tools is one of the key indicators of a high-performance organization because without them, verification that the design meets customer
requirements can't be done early
enough to impact design decisions.
This is a common cause of producing
designs that fail to meet customer expectations. Employing the right tools
early in the process implants quality
principles that help to drive the cultural change necessary to reach higher
levels of performance and customer
satisfaction.

Software solutions to enable
high performance development
processes

Fibersim helps engineers easily create designs that can be efficiently
validated to ensure on-target performance. It also enables the smooth
flow of composite design data across
the development team, supporting key stakeholders in the analysis,
design, manufacturing, and quality
functions.
An important capability Fibersim
offers is its support for verification by
analysis. Analysts and designers in
aerospace usually work independently, focusing on their own domains,
making it difficult to see the project
from a comprehensive viewpoint.
This approach is slow, difficult, and
expensive to make changes after the
first iteration. Composite part design
becomes a mostly serial process,
which doesn't support management's
desire for a high performance process
with shorter product cycles, less
rework, and no cost overruns.
Add to this the fact that composite
part design involves more unknowns
and interdependencies than traditional metallic part design. The typical
serial product development process
associated with composite part development hinders the complex adjustments necessary to improve a design.
This negates the inclusion of design

advantages specific to composites,
such as material orientation tailoring.
Serial processes also routinely inflate
design allowances and safety factors,
effectively treating composites as
"black aluminum" and forgoing the
benefits to be gained by use of the
material. There are many areas where
the speed, efficiency, and quality of
the process can be improved.
For example, in preliminary design
there is usually very little geometry
created. Frequently the development
team will use a zone or grid based
design methodology to simplify the
definition and ease communication
between design and analysis groups.
If this definition cannot be transferred directly to the software used by
the design engineer, the potential for
errors to occur in the ensuing manual
translation is very high - and this is
only the first place inefficiencies can
occur.
Once detailed design begins, analysts
frequently need to provide updated
definitions of laminates to design
engineers. Easy and accurate communication of this information to the
design engineer, who now has begun
to define the detailed design, is critical. Failure to communicate updates
efficiently often result in lost work

Siemens PLM Software offers a
complete suite of tools that help
engineers with the entire composite
development process. Each tool has a
unique focus on a different part of the
process such as validation of material
models and allowables, management
of global airframe analysis, optimization and design of laminates, verification of performance under static and
cyclic loading, and other areas.
The Fibersim portfolio of software
for composites engineering, for
example, captures the best practices
of composite design and puts them
at the fingertips of design engineers.

Fig. 1: Concurrent Design and Analysis Workflow for Composite Part Development

No92 October - November 2014 /

jec composites magazine 45

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #92 - October/November 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #92 - October/November 2014