This paper was produced for the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

Composite laminate materials are becoming more readily available for use within product design, however analysis of composite laminates remains a crucial bottleneck in the overall design process. This difficulty in analysis further increases when the component is non-planar or has a non-constant thickness since the ply lay-up definition can vary significantly across the component, making current techniques costly and time consuming.



This work sets out the method and testing for a decomposition method for preparing composite analysis models, which can be utilised to efficiently analyse 3D composite laminate components at an earlier stage of the design process. Termed the Internally Smeared Method, it looks to identify the regions of the model likely to carry the most load and model these in detail, whilst using an efficient smearing approach in the remaining regions. The benefits of this are two-fold, the first being a significant reduction in the pre-processing and computational time when compared against a full ply-by-ply analysis whilst still maintaining a good degree of accuracy. The second is the flexibility in downstream decisions e.g. the ply lay-up within the smeared regions, where the exact placement of plies is often not confirmed until the manufacturing stages. This would enable a more flexible and adaptive design environment for the early stage testing of composite laminate components.