Flying Solo Falls Short Working with Composites

By Steve Luby, founder, president, and CEO of VISTAGY

The challenges of designing and manufacturing high-performance products are increasing: the products are more complicated, the schedules are more demanding, and budgets are tighter. How can a company possibly meet all of these requirements?

  One key way to meet these challenges is by enabling analysts and designers to develop more effective partnerships. If analysts and designers are empowered to work in parallel rather than in a serial fashion, they’ll work faster, smarter, and ultimately produce a more robust product. This kind of precision teamwork is hard to beat.

  A good example of the need for such a partnership is provided by the commercial aircraft industry. In recent years, aircraft manufacturing has been transitioning from aluminum to composite materials. In fact, new commercial aircraft are comprised of more than 50 percent composite materials by weight. That percentage will almost certainly continue to rise.

  While the composite materials enable aircraft makers to really push the envelope by enhancing fuel efficiency, trimming service costs, and enabling longer flights, it comes at a cost of significant complexity. A metal part is typically a defined shape and alloy and relatively straightforward compared to a composite, which can involve hundreds of plies of carbon fiber with different orientations, shapes, and lay-up starting points. As a result, making sure the analyst and designer communicate effectively is more important than ever.

  Typically, analysts do their work and hand it off to the designer. Making changes based on additional analysis after the first iteration is slow, difficult, and expensive. As composites were being used more, there was a clear need to facilitate collaboration between analysts and designers so they could perform more iterations later in the process. That is essential to evaluate tradeoffs in part performance, weight, and manufacturing costs and, ultimately, to arrive at the part’s optimal configuration.

  VISTAGY and MSC.Software recently addressed this issue by integrating FiberSIM, our suite of composites product development software, with MSC’s SimXpert finite element analysis software. Stress information created in SimXpert can be communicated to FiberSIM with a single click, creating a common data representation and design tool for composite lay-up.

  Now analysts and designers can work in parallel, which increases the number of iterations they can go through in a given time, thus enabling them to optimize the part while saving time and reducing costs.

  This integration is significant for a lot of reasons, but two stand out:

  First, it demonstrates how important it is to deliver specific solutions for different classes of product. By focusing on particular industry challenges, we can extend the platform and have a much greater impact on the process and the product. It gives aerospace analysts and designers something that understands their process.

  Secondly, this integration reveals the inherent value of teamwork over — if you’ll pardon the expression —  flying solo. The contribution of the individual had peaked. There was no way to improve the process or the product without providing a way for the disciplines to communicate with each other more effectively.

  Our partnership with MSC.Software is a good example of how top companies must continuously find ways to provide a common environment for different disciplines to overcome the constraints inherent in producing highly sophisticated products. 

Steve Luby is founder, president, and CEO of VISTAGY. Feedback on this commentary can be sent via e-mail to [email protected].