Composites

FiberSIM^® Enables Ship and Boat Builders to Enhance Development of Composite Parts

In recent years, military, commercial, and recreational shipyards have shown a growing interest in adopting a more productive and sophisticated composites engineering process. That’s because composites do not corrode and are durable and easier to maintain than metal structures. As a result, shipbuilders have begun to evaluate the engineering tools that have proved successful in other industries.

Manufacturers of boats and ships of all sizes and complexity are seeking ways to enhance their competitiveness. Bringing their products to market faster and at less cost is critical to accomplishing that goal. Enhancing productivity is a key driver in the face of a tough economic climate and growing global competition. By reducing cycle times, inventories drop and the return on tooling use increases, which provides more time for customization. Reducing engineering and production costs, labor costs and material costs all improve the bottom line.

As the ship and boatbuilding industry has recognized the value of adopting composite design software to serve as the backbone of the engineering process, VISTAGY’s FiberSIM^® software has emerged as leading solution for supporting the entire design-to-manufacturing process.

FiberSIM enables engineers to design for a variety of challenging tasks facing the marine industry, including the complex geometry of the 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 enables a precise producibility simulation of the manufacturing process, thus reducing the need for prototypes and streamlining ply splicing, darting, and flattening.

By providing a complete and detailed 3D master model of the composite part or assembly, manufacturers are able to implement a:

• Seamless link from design to the manufacturing floor that drives automated cutting, laser projection and automated deposition;
• High quality and repeatable process that stems from the accuracy and completeness of the master model defined with composites engineering software;
• Process for predicting potential manufacturing issues ahead of time to save time and eliminate rework;
• Concurrent design and analysis process for better part optimization and validation;
• Specialized design methodology for a variety of parts;
• Powerful and rapid engineering change management procedures.

As a result, the engineering process for developing marine components is becoming faster, more predictable, and more reliable. Design changes happen less often and can be processed faster with fewer communication errors. Less time is spent on non value-added tasks and, best of all, more time is spent on actual engineering that results in unique innovations and quality improvements.