Recreational Boats

Fibersim™ Streamlines Composites Engineering Process for Recreational Boat Manufacturers

Composite materials are right at home in water and offer many benefits for recreational vessels such as sail boats and power boats. First, composites stand up well to the harsh and salty marine environment, resisting any corrosion while possessing much better aging capabilities than metals. Secondly, lightweight composites enable weight reduction and a lower center of gravity for the vessel structure, which contributes to better seafaring.

Indeed, composites provide the ability to "design the material" by combining fibers and resins in different ways and by placing the fibers along preferred orientations following loading and stress paths, thus reducing the weight-to-strength and weight-to-stiffness ratios.

As a result, composite design software is rapidly becoming the backbone of the engineering process in the marine industry and Vistagy’s Fibersim software is the solution of choice for many manufacturers of recreational vessels.

By developing a complete and detailed 3D CAD model of the composite part or assembly, Fibersim enables manufacturers to streamline the once inefficient and laborious process by enabling them to achieve 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 eliminate manual rework cycles;
• Concurrent design and analysis process for better part optimization and validation;
• Specialized design methodology for a variety of parts;
• Powerful engineering change management process.

Composites are “drapable” to a large extent over round surfaces while sheet metals are not. Therefore, hulls, decks, submarine fairings streamlined for best fluid flow performance are all ideal candidates for composite manufacturing. The ability of Fibersim to predict possible manufacturing issues greatly facilitates the manufacture of such complex shapes for better hydrodynamic performance and, ultimately, makes it an ideal solution for designing and manufacturing composite parts for recreational vessels.

With Fibersim, the engineering process for developing composite parts for the full range of recreational boats is becoming more predictable and reliable. Design changes happen less often and can be processed faster and with fewer communication errors. Less time is spent on non value-added tasks and, best of all, more time is spent on actual engineering and innovation.