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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.

Electrically operated high temperature furnaces and reactors are used in many industrial manufacturing processes such as sintering or single crystal growth in order to allow for the required process conditions. In view of their outstanding characteristics refractory metals are ideally suited as materials for the resistive heating elements. Nevertheless, significant and lifetime-limiting irreversible deformations of these elements can be frequently observed which are assumed to be caused by a combination of temperature expansion, electromagnetic forces, and high temperature creep effects.

Identication of fatigue cracks in turbo-machinery components is a vital but costly effort. This work focuses on nonlinearities in the response behavior resulting from the opening and closing of cracks that results in super-harmonic resonances due to harmonic excitations. Experimental results for a cracked cantilever beam are presented as well as the results from numerical simulations of an integrally bladed compressor disk FE model.

Today manufacturing companies are more and more often characterized by a growing product

and processes complexity. Projects needs the participation of a pool of companies that have to

The modelling of welds is desirable to predict the distortion of components during manufacture, the position and magnitude of peak residual stresses and to predict metallurgical effects in specific regions. Welds are a complex modelling problem requiring both thermal and structural solutions. This has lead to the development of several weld-specific simulation packages and codes for finite element analysis packages. This paper describes the application of the newly developed Abaqus 2D Weld Modeller to simulate the residual stress field in ferritic weld test specimens.