eXstream Engineering and Volume Graphics Collaborate on Mechanical Simulation of Materials

e-Xstream engineering, an MSC Software company, part of Hexagon, and Volume Graphics, two suppliers of software for multi-scale material modeling and industrial computed tomography (CT), respectively, cooperate in the area of mechanical simulation of fiber compound materials and components. The combined use and the interfaces between the software solutions of e-Xstream and Volume Graphics allows companies active in developing and producing fiber compound components to optimize manufacturing parameters.

Using the Volume Graphics software suite VGSTUDIO MAX, fiber orientations and fiber volume fractions can be determined from CT scans of fiber compound material probes or components and mapped onto existing volume meshes (in PATRAN or NASTRAN format). This information can be used for validation of fiber distributions from injection molding simulations. It can also be directly fed into mechanical simulations of fiber compound materials or components. For this purpose, a dedicated format for export from VGSTUDIO MAX into Digimat is available.

The interface between VGSTUDIO MAX and Digimat has now been extended to support the export of porosity information from CT scans into Digimat. The export of the porosity information is a function of VGSTUDIO MAX since version 3.2.4, whereas the import is a function of Digimat since version 2019.0. The extended interface allows to map microporosity in a statistical way onto a volume mesh by calculating the average porosity level for each cell of the mesh in VGSTUDIO MAX and then exporting it to Digimat. Furthermore, macro-porosity can be mapped individually, i.e. pore by pore, onto the receiving volume mesh in Digimat. 

“The extended interface between VGSTUDIO MAX and Digimat allows to investigate the influence of porosity on the mechanical properties of fiber compounds, no matter whether the porosity is unintended or introduced on purpose, such as in foam injection molding processes,” says Philippe Hebert, product manager, e-Xstream engineering.

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e-Xstream engineering

Volume Graphics

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.