Finite Element Analysis (FEA) for Composites

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Noran Engineering has Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software tools that allow composite product and design engineers to examine the structural, dynamic, and thermal aspects of their designs with detailed graphical visualization of data and results.

The insight gained by such analysis allows designers to easily try alternate approaches, optimize their designs, improve quality, reduce design cycle time, and save time and money on prototypes and first articles. NEiNastran's value has been proven by engineers in a wide variety of industries including aerospace, military, automotive, maritime, sports, and consumer products. Formula 1 race cars, America's Cup yachts, Tour de France bicycles and entrepreneurial commercial spacecraft are just a few examples of highly advanced projects that rely on NEiNastran.

Composite materials analysis imposes a number of requirements that are significantly different when compared to isotropic materials and FEA software used for composite analysis must be designed to handle the anisotropic nature of composites and the failure mechanisms associated with their properties like cracks, delaminations, and fiber failure. In addition, high quality FEA software should include features that make it easy to use while providing the engineer with the power to get results that are practical and truly valuable for application to real world problems. NEiNastran fills this need for composite designers with a number of features in model creation, material definition, meshing, post processing, failure criteria, and data presentation.

1. User friendly definition of material properties
2. Definition of ply lay-up
3. Easy orientation definition
4. Outer mold line representation
5. Post processing visualizations that pinpoints problem areas
6. Failure Indices and Strength Ratio
7. 3D CAD Models
8. Sensitivity and Configuration Trade Off Studies

• User friendly definition of material properties. Clear, easy input of strength and stiffness terms with access to material libraries.

• Definition of ply lay-up. Stacking sequences can be quickly and easily entered into a table, and symmetry can be used to reduce entries. Modification and changes are easily made and the chance of error is greatly reduced.

• Easy orientation definition. Curved surfaces can complicate the orientation of fibers. NEiNastran can project a cylindrical or spherical coordinate system onto a structure to get good representation of ply orientation. Advanced application can carry out draping analysis with NEi Laminate Tools if this degree of fidelity is required.

• Outer mold line representation.

• Post processing visualizations that pinpoints problem areas. Enormous amounts of data can be involved in multi lay-up and multi ply structures. NEi Nastran provides a logical path from stress analysis of a structure to Failure Index results that can isolate problems and pinpoint them to definite regions on specific plies.

• Failure Indices and Strength Ratio. NEi Nastran supports all the major composite failure analysis indices Tsai-Wu, Hill, Hoffman. Plus NEi Nastran includes the most modern forms of Puck and NASA Langley LARC02. In addition, the Strength Ratio is available for easy linear scaling and qualitative analysis.

NASA Langley has developed LARC02, a set of first-ply-failure criteria which have shown to be accurate and physically consistent. It is well suited for design purposes because it balances accuracy, material characterization requirements, computational effort, and ease of results interpretation.

Advanced Failure Criteria for Composites

• LaRC02 Set of Criteria
• Developed by NASA
• First-ply-failure
• Physically based
• Hashin, Puck approach
• No additional material properties required compared to Tsai-Wu
• Failure mode taken into account
• Extensive validation (WWFE)
  

Stability Index Output for Sandwich Structures

• Theory based on Facesheet Wrinkling in Sandwich Structures, NASA-CR-1999-208994, 1999

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