Plastics, composites, and other advanced materials are replacing metal across multiple industries. The main benefit provided by replacing metallic designs with advanced material designs is the ability to make a product lighter. Advanced materials add challenges to the design process for parts, assemblies, and structures that use these materials. The material behavior is often non-linear, anisotropic, and influenced by how products are manufactured. Helius PFA software provides powerful capabilities for simulating these beneficial but complex materials within a mechanical design. The Helius PFA software suite includes Advanced Material Exchange software for mapping manufacturing data from Moldflow Insight to structural simulation. Join Autodesk, Inc., to learn about the newest features, use cases, best practices for using Helius PFA software, and on the future of advanced material simulation at Autodesk.

This talk will present how the integration of Autodesk Nastran software, Helius PFA software with Advanced Material Exchange (AME) capabilities, and Moldflow software work together in the real world of complex composite simulations. Composite materials are an advanced family of materials that have been in development for decades and continue to gain usage in the aerospace, marine, automotive, and sporting goods industries. While composites enjoy benefits such as high strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios, they are considerably more complicated than most metals and plastics. Helius PFA with its AME capabilities is part of the Autodesk Solution for digital prototyping, and it provides fast, accurate, and flexible tools for enhanced finite element analysis (FEA) of composite structures-manufactured from unidirectional or woven composites to injection-molded, short-fiber filled composites-including progressive failure analysis to help reduce testing and shorten design cycles by identifying potentially unforeseen design and material deficiencies.

Weld lines can have negatively affect the part performance as well as the aesthetics. In this class we will discuss new developments around weld line strength prediction, and show a case study about how to improve a weld line formation after holes by using a differential of local thickness. The area around hole was split in 5 zones or thickness parameters. The maximum of change was 0.5mm. The thickness change was made in Dual domain mesh and after is generate 3D mesh. The weld line was evaluate by how many edge elements was count in “Weld Line” result.

The methodology was used consist in automatic workflow using 3 main programs: ANSA is a pre-processor and responsible for change of thickness in DD mesh and export model for Autodesk Moldflow Insight; this one, by command line, is going to do 3D mesh and set up and run a fill analysis; Isight is an optimization program that will control all process and to do a DOE for measuring a sensibility of thickness around the featur. 

The formation of weld lines during the injection molding process can be practically unavoidable for most complex plastic parts. A weld line—defined by the mating of the free surfaces of 2 separate flow fronts—can reduce the aesthetic appeal of the part and often reduces the structural integrity of the part at the mating surface. In this presentation, results from a  Moldflow Insight software analysis are used to determine the weld surface locations, and Advanced Material Exchange software is used to map the results from Moldflow Insight software to the structural simulation. The strength reduction is taken into account in a nonlinear finite element analysis using Helius PFA software to accurately predict the crack initiation and growth of a mechanically loaded electrical isolating rod disconnector.

To archive the lightweight and optimization design for Automotive component, the advance material will be used, so the fiber orientation, the residual stress, weld line location and warpage are very important for the design improve, also the Co-Simulation (Moldflow Insight + Helius PFA + ABAQUS) is used to evaluate the strength and remove the weakness in potential. This will greatly reduce the demand for the high cost of physical prototype testing.