CAE Method of Generating Composite Unique Fiber Path (CUFP)

In the era of rapidly increasing of EV/AVs, there are more electronic Modules/sensors & bigger battery packs added to EV (Electric Vehicles) vehicles, which has resulted in added mass penalty thereby impacting the range of EV vehicles. Range anxiety remains one of the biggest obstacles to widespread electric-car adoption, which drives the necessity of mass optimization to improve EV range. Multi-material design is a trend to lightweight automotive structures. The automotive industry is looking to make use of carbon fibers in their subsystem design. The challenge in current unidirectional carbon fiber design is difficulty to tailor stiffness/ strength across the fiber direction & orienting plies to system / vehicle load path. Optimization of ply angle for unidirectional composite provides constant fiber angle across the ply which does not address multiple load paths of all component /system. This drives for an opportunity to get the fiber angles tailor made to specific load path / system usage and optimized for multiple loads to subsystem (e.g., modal response, lateral stiffness, customer pulldown behavior in an automotive liftgate system). The goal of the study is to come up with a method of extracting optimized fiber angle for each finite element grid and generate fiber paths for each ply, which can be shared with supplier to manufacture custom ply’s specific to subsystem/component [3].