Overview

Welcome to the Composites Forming User's Guide!
This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the product.
This overview provides the following information:

Composites Forming in a Nutshell

Composites Forming involves shaping flat composites material blanks into three-dimensional forms, typically using molds, grippers and diaphragms in an automated process.

Composites Forming proposes:

  • A repeatable and automatable process.
  • The capability to form many plies concurrently in one step.
  • High production rates (Cycles times of the order of minutes).
  • Tooling similar to metal forming, allowing the use of metal forming skills.
  • The process can be used for many shapes currently stamped out of metals, subject to some restrictions.
  • Blanks can be made of relatively cheap precursors, such as NCFs - Non-crimp fabrics.

The challenges of composites forming include:

  • High-performance continuous fibers cannot yield like metals, leading to severe deformation of the formed materials and wrinkling of the blanks.
  • The blanks move during forming and it is difficult to predict this.
  • The process has many dependencies in terms of material properties, tooling preparation, and production rates

Producibility for Forming can predict the forming of a candidate preform to address these difficulties: The earlier problems can be predicted, the earlier design changes can be made and the lower the chance of specifying an infeasible design.
In general, the time taken to perform a simulation increases with the fidelity and resolution of the simulation model.
Complex analyses can take days to run, which is useless for initial design purposes.
Composites Forming lets you select the appropriate level of simulation at each stage of the development process.

At an early stage of design, perform a quick simulation, run in the order of seconds. It uses geometrical or inverse
methods, depending on the material model required.

Later on, run a full explicit nonlinear finite element simulation of the forming model. This detailed simulation allows the use of various levels of mesh refinement:

  • A coarse mesh, run in the order of minutes, recovers global results like the movement of blanks and the effect of material properties.
  • A fine mesh, run in the order of hours or days, allows the prediction of detailed results like wrinkle formation.

In experimental studies, wrinkles form gradually during the forming process and there is no snap-through instability in the material.

Before Reading this Guide

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore, we recommend that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products. It also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.

Getting the Most Out of this Guide

To get the most out of this guide, we suggest that you start reading the User Tasks section, which deals with handling all the product functions.
In particular, read About Forming Simulations and About the Forming Process.
The Workbench Description section, which describes the Composites Forming workbench, will also certainly prove useful to find your way around the Composites Forming workbench.
Navigating in the Split View mode is recommended. This mode offers a framed layout allowing direct access from the table of contents to the information.

Accessing Sample Documents

To perform the scenarios, sample documents are provided all along this documentation. For more information on accessing sample documents, refer to Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.

Conventions Used in this Guide
To learn more about the conventions used in this guide, please refer to Conventions section.
 
All functionalities described in this User's Guide are available with Composites Forming.