Editor’s Pick: MultiMech for ANSYS

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Analyzing composite parts is tough, time-consuming and often costly work. It’s likely you rely on some sort of curve fitting technique to model a composite’s behavior. You may have a nagging feeling that you’re really guessing about composite properties. Or maybe your confidence is not so high in how much you know about composite material behavior. So you over-engineer models, running up costs. If composites analysis is your bane, today’s Pick of the Week should really appeal to you.

The short take on today’s Pick is that MultiMechanics has announced that their MultiMech composites and advanced materials structural analysis software now embeds inside the ANSYS Workbench simulation platform. MultiMechanics also offers a similar MultiMech integration for Dassault Systèmes’ SIMULIA Abaqus/CAE finite element (FE) modeling, visualization and process automation solution, and the company is part of the Altair HyperWorks Partner Alliance. In other words, it’s got chops.

What MultiMech for ANSYS does is bring an efficient FEA (finite element analysis) methodology to the microstructure level. It provides a two-way coupled multiscale FE analysis so that both your part and its underlying material microstructure solve concurrently. MultiMech means that you can use realistic representations of your material microstructures to simulate how those microstructures affect the linear, nonlinear and fatigue performance of your part as well as simulate how applied loads affect a part’s material.

With MultiMech for ANSYS, you can create and test composites with multiple types of reinforcement and execute progressive damage analysis on pretty much any type of composite – unidirectional and woven composites, short and long chopped fiber as well as composites with voids, defects and particulates. It will help you predict structural failure based on microstructural design variables like fiber orientation, and you can model multiple damage mechanisms — resin cracking, ply delamination, etc. — simultaneously.

MultiMech for ANSYS has a bunch more going for it. For example, it has user-productivity features like an automatic microstructural FE model generator, one-click virtual material testing capabilities, additive manufacturing simulation and integration with injection-molding orientation data. Many of these are covered in today’s Pick of the Week write-up as well as on the webpages at the other end of the supplied links. The videos are short and cool, so watch them. As always, your best bet is to click on the link and sign up for a trial copy to test MultiMech for ANSYS yourself. Good stuff.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering