FiberSim Design for Manufacturing of Laminated Composite Parts at Sikorsky Aircraft

Today’s advanced composite materials offer dramatic performance capabilities, opening many new and exciting engineering possibilities. However, the promise of tremendous increases in strength and stiffness, together with weight savings, has its price. Engineering with continuous fiber composites places great demands on designers, analysts, and manufacturing engineers and carries large development costs. Due to a lack of understanding of the material distortions involved and their effect on mechanical properties, additional material is added to provide adequate safety factors. This over design eliminates much of the potential weight savings and adds significantly to part costs. This lack of insight into material behavior can also generates non-producible designs, often specifying continuous sheets over impossible contours. This non-producibility is traditionally not discovered until part fabrication is attempted, long after the designs are released, resulting in expensive redesigns. To take full advantage of the potential of composite materials, designers and analysts require new tools to provide visibility into how materials behave and how that effects the producibility issues within a part design. This paper will describe Sikorsky’s use of FiberSim, a new CAE tool from Composite Design Technologies that provides the necessary insight required to effectively analyze an advanced composite part and to generate a producible part design. FiberSim simulates how a composite material will behave by modeling how fibers will conform to part contours as constrained by the manufacturing process and material type. FiberSim’s capabilities support a concurrent engineering methodology by giving early warning of manufacturing complications such as wrinkles, dart requirements and 2D ply profiles larger than raw stocks. FiberSim also provides a foundation for efficient and precise structural analysis of an “as simulated” final configuration, reducing uncertainties and the safety factors required.