CATIA V5 supports composite design and manufacture The use of components designed in carbon fibre composite is rapidly increasing across all industries, none more so than the aerospace industry. The widespread use of composites on aircraft such as the BOEING 787 and Airbus A350XWB is significant, it is claimed for the later that over 60% of the airframe will be of composite materials. In the second half of 2006, Intrinsys were asked to support composite product training based on its own engineering experience in this area. A team spent time working in Paris at Dassault Systemes to develop product skills in this field and are now involved with projects in both automotive and aerospace industries. The number of available software products used in the design and manufacture of composites components is limited, however Dassault Systemes have successfully developed CATIA V5 functionality in the form of two products that fit together seamlessly, providing capability to support both the design and manufacture disciplines. The products adopt as their core the key processes developed by the large corporate businesses. However, this is not to say that the products can only be used by the larger companies. A company that looks to improve their internal processes to reduce costs and therefore remain competitive, will quickly realise the benefits of using these products, Composite Engineering (CPE) and Composite Design for Manufacturing (CPM). Both products can be rolled into one as Composites Design 3 (CPD) for the complete solution. CPE is very flexible and allows the designer to create, very quickly useable geometry. This geometry can be further enhanced to fully define the part or can be easily used in a DMU environment as part of a design review process. The fully defined part model includes the individual ply geometry (as wireframe) with their associated properties to include, material type and orientation. Solid geometry and / or surfaces can also be created for use in downstream activities or within the DMU environment. A particularly useful feature is the ply exploder that provides the designer with a visualisation of the ply stack. This feature is also used within the manufacturing product for creating the ply-book. CPM synchronises with the engineering model enabling automatic updates of the ply geometry and thus the benefits of employing concurrent practices can be realised. Further gains can be made through the early assessment of the manufacturability of the plies, adjustments to the ply geometry can then be made if required and then reassessed before issuing the geometry for manufacture. This ability reduces the downstream shop-floor activities significantly in terms of ply production and lay-up. Component material waste and lay-up times can be reduced and thus further savings can be made. Furthermore the flattened ply profiles can be readily exported as data files for importing into a nesting package in the common file formats. The fact that all created geometry exists within the V5 toolset for both the design and manufacture points of view, cannot be under valued in terms of data management and quality, making the V5 products a very good all round solution.

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