Successfully Implement Practical Solutions when using FEA with Composites

Many designs now use composite structures or components, taking advantage of the increased structural strength and stiffness to weight ratios, simpler manufacturing process or more innovative design capability that composites bring. The nature of the composite used can range from cheap and freely available glass fiber reinforced systems to exotic and specifically tailored carbon or kevlar systems, with many forms of manufacturing process available.

The challenge for the designer and analyst is to determine the resulting stiffness and strength of the design. Faced with the complexity of real world structural systems the analyst has to make decisions on the type of idealization and level of detail required in the Finite Element Analysis.

Your design may include thick composite sections with large numbers of plies, there may be regions of significant ply drop off. Tee joints may be loaded in tension. In these cases the through thickness effects become very important for strength prediction.

The shape of the structure may imply changes in draping angle or layup thickness and it may be important to model this accurately.There are a wide range of failure theories, together with potentially large amounts of stress or strain data from a multi ply layup.

Due to the nature of the composite the stress components can include many more terms than a conventional metallic material for example.Whatever the nature of the challenge, this objective of this course is to break down the composite analysis process into clearly defined steps, give an overview of the physics involved and show how to successfully implement practical solutions using Finite Element Analysis.

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