Overview

Welcome to the Composites Braiding 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 Braiding in a Nutshell

Composites Braiding:
  • Determines the continuous variation of fiber angles, coverage and material thicknesses around the cross section and along the part for a better mandrel shape generation and more accurate results.
  • Provides a seamless link to computation and manufacturing tools, for an integrated and efficient process.
  • Allows the optimization of the braiding parameters along the components (improved fiber angles) to meet mechanical requirements at minimum cost.

To achieve these capabilities, Composites Braiding supports

  • Target angle/coverage ratio,

  • Or variable input parameters such as:

    • Braiding ring geometry
    • Machines parameters such as the number of carriers, variable speeds, material data, tow strength.
  • Multiple fiber directions to support braiding (clockwise, anticlockwise, axial directions). Axial fiber directions are defined by crossing clockwise and anti-clockwise fibers. Composites Braiding provides a reliable computation of the intersection of braided fibers, and the definition of the continuous axial fibers.
    The resulting thickness is used to compute the final surfaces.

Buckling, i.e. negative strain in fiber direction, is not supported.

Simulation runs

  • On multi-layers braided parts
  • Outwards: From the mandrel surface towards the outer part surface (The model is the mandrel surface).
  • And inwards from the outer part surface towards the mandrel surface (The model is the desired final surface).

Simulation also allows the definition of starting and finishing lengths, as the braiding process begins before the leading end and ends after the trailing end of the mandrel.

 The simulated mandrel speeds are transferred to the braiding machine and provide accurate results.

Producibility for Braiding provides

  • The display of braiding results (coverage, deviation, separation, thickness, concavity), using user-defined scales.
  • The visualization of concave areas from the braiding perspective.

Composites Braiding provides export capabilities

  • Via a layup file (Layer properties, areal weight from each layer, support for RTM simulation)
  • Via a XML file (mandrel path and speed) to be use by braiding machines.

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.
The Workbench Description section, which describes the Composites Braiding workbench, will also certainly prove useful to find your way around the Composites Braiding 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 Braiding.