SIMULIA's blog

Space flight re-entry vehicles impart highly dynamic loads on the crew and/or payload during a water landing. To understand the behavior of the vehicle/payload system as it makes impact, a predictive framework that can simultaneously model the structure, the highly deformable landing medium (water or soil), and their interaction is required. The coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) method in Abaqus/Explicit provides the means for capturing these complex physical phenomena.

Composite structures often have a higher capacity for ab-sorbing energy than their metal counterparts. The crush-ing behavior of composite materials is complex, and the inclusion of composite components in vehicles for crash protection can necessitate expensive experimental test-ing. The ability to computationally simulate the crushing response of composite structures can significantly shorten the product development cycle and reduce cost in the aerospace, automotive, and railway industries.

Bird strikes cost the United States aviation industry tens of millions of dollars annually in aircraft damage and schedule delays. Increasing the ability of the aircraft to resist bird strike induced damage is one part of an overall approach to mitigating this expense [1]. Experimental bird strike testing is part of the certification process for certain aircraft component designs. If a subset of the tests can be replaced with computational simula-tion, the cost of the prototype testing can be reduced.

A mechanical system, such as aircraft landing gear, can have a large number of parts that interact in a complex nonlinear fashion. The challenge of simulating such a sys-tem lies not only in capturing the correct physical behavior but in using efficient analysis techniques. Different levels of modeling abstraction may be appropriate for different stages of the design process. Initial sizing and kinematics can be studied with a partially rigid representation, while final designs are more often analyzed with fully meshed flexible geometry.

Composite materials offer significant design advantages in the aerospace industry. High strength and light weight are the two most attractive features for aircraft and space vehicle designs. However, their complex material behav-ior makes analysis of these structures a significant chal-lenge, particularly in a high speed impact event. The ad-vanced composite modeling and industry leading simula-tion capabilities of Abaqus/Explicit make analysis of these challenging materials straightforward and allow accurate prediction of ballistic limit, damage and failure.

The use of composite materials in the aerospace industry is increasing. Composite materials offer a relatively high strength-to-weight ratio as well as the ability to create large, integrated structures. One composite component can replace 10 or more traditional metal parts, which can dramatically reduce manufacturing time and cost.

The Vernay VernaFlo® flow controls are custom-designed fluid flow management devices used in a wide range of applications and systems where consistent, reliable op-eration is essential. Elastomeric rubber components in these devices deform under the influence of upstream variations in fluid pressure. These deformations adjust the orifice diameter and help maintain a constant down-stream flow rate. In this Technology Brief the perform-ance of a custom VernaFlo® device is evaluated using the fully coupled fluid-structure interaction solution provided by the Abaqus co-simulation capability.

Engineering problems that involve the coupled response of a flowing fluid and a deforming structure constitute a broad class referred to as fluid-structure interaction (FSI). The interaction can be mechanical, thermal, or both. Many important problems involve some form of FSI, but the coupling effect is often ignored because of a lack of readily available solution technology. To address this limitation, Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA Corp. and Fluent, Inc. have partnered to provide a coupled solution capability.

As the maximum speed of bullet trains continues to increase, overheating and thermal deformation/stress on brake systems are going to be critical for emergency stops. Precise prediction of the maximum temperature is needed for the design of brake systems, especially  for both discs and linings, where how to handle the high speed spinning of discs is the point of the heat/structure coupled analyses. Abaqus provides couple of potential methods but each one had critical shortcomings.

One key aspect for the design of fast and flexible steam turbine operation is thermal stresses arising during transient operation. If the stresses exceed the fatigue limits of the material, the lifetime of the steam turbine is shortened. Detailed finite element analysis is applied during design phase to assess the effect of transient temperature and stress profiles on the complex geometries. A significant amount of design effort is invested to determine the optimal process parameters for start-up (e.g.