FiberSIM® Enhances the Design-to-Manufacturing Process for Composite Aircraft Engine Components
Composites are becoming the material of choice for aircraft engine components. After all, using composites in aircraft engines enables manufacturers to reduce weight, improve performance and, in the case of ceramic matrix composites (which are typically used in the hot turbine section of the engine, for parts such as guiding vanes, turbine blades and shrouds), increase in-service temperatures and reduce cooling requirements.
VISTAGY’s FiberSIM® composites engineering software has been used for these purposes for years. In fact, leading aircraft engine manufacturers use FiberSIM to support the entire design-to-manufacturing process for composite engine components.
FiberSIM enables you to design for a variety of challenging tasks, including the complex geometry of aircraft engine parts, the intricate definition of laminates, a variety of ply shapes and materials, and the large number of plies and ply stacks that generate enormous amounts of data. FiberSIM generates a precise producibility simulation of the CAD model, thus reducing the need for prototypes and streamlining ply splicing, darting and flattening.
FiberSIM’s close integration with finite element analysis (FEA) software enables a concurrent design and analysis process which is critical to aircraft engine part design. Given the harsh in-service and extreme loading conditions and all the design and manufacturing constraints, high performance aircraft engine components must be thoroughly optimized. Therefore, a tight integration between detailed design and accurate stress analysis is critical to successfully producing robust composite engine parts.
FiberSIM supports a seamless transfer of all design data to manufacturing for multiple processes, including manual layup, resin transfer molding, automated fiber placement (AFP) and tape laying (ATL). As the use of composite materials continues to increase, VISTAGY and FiberSIM are poised to play an increasingly important role in the design and manufacture of these highly sophisticated aircraft engine parts.
Finally, the aircraft engine manufacturers and their suppliers typically use a variety of CAD systems, including Siemens NX, PTC Pro/Engineer and Dassault Systèmes CATIA V5. FiberSIM’s ability to run on all these CAD systems makes VISTAGY a unique and valuable solution.
Learn more about FiberSIM. Contact us now.