Centro de recursos de SIMULIA

A technical overview of the solar electric vehicle ‘Orion’, developed by Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER), is presented here. The vehicle is the second built by the team, and will be raced across Australia in the World Solar Challenge in October 2009. The paper gives particular reference to the use of Abaqus in simulation and optimisation of the structural performance of the vehicle chassis, shell and wheel motor.

Customer Papers

Fatigue life prediction has reached a high level in respect to practical handling and accuracy in the last decades. As a result of insecure or lacking input data deviations between numerical results and test results in terms of cycles till crack initiation are possible. On the one hand, the accuracy of Finite Element results gets better and better because of greatly increasing computer power and mesh density. Whereas on the other hand, the situation is much more critical regarding load data and especially regarding local material properties of the components.

Customer Papers

Virtual design tools are gaining more and more importance in the production process of medical devices. Biomedical devices and their surrounding boundary conditions are usually characterized by complex geometrical shapes, materials and interactions, and current Abaqus capabilities in dealing with highly non-linear problems are highly needed to realistically capture these complexities. In order to investigate in detail some of the above mentioned aspects of stenting we have developed a dedicated pre- and postprocessing tool based on the open-source design software pyFormex. This paper aims at providing a survey of the latest developments carried out in our research unit in this area and detailed information with respect to the simulations can be found in the cited works.

Customer Papers

Abaqus is often applied to solve geomechanical boundary value problems. Several Abaqus built-in features enable a wide range of simulating such problems. For complex problems Abaqus can be extended via user subroutines. Several extensions for soil mechanics purposes are discussed and corresponding case studies are presented.

Customer Papers

In recent years, finite element method has been considered the main tool for solving geomechanical boundary value problems. Studying geotechnical problems like collapse analysis of a quay wall construction or pile penetration into the subsoil, it is evident that large deformation of the soil body can occur. The main problems in these analyses are contact problems and large deformations of the FE-mesh. Abaqus, version 6.8 now provides a new tool, the Coupled EulerianLagrangian method (CEL), to deal with large deformation problems. With this new method the drawback of the FE-method, which originates from its reliance on a lagrangian mesh, can be overcome. In this paper, two benchmark problems are analyzed using the CEL-method, the results are compared to classic implicit- and explicit-solutions.

Customer Papers

Cylindrical tanks are subjected to the seismic loads in certain countries, for example in Japan. The sloshing of these tanks is very important to consider the integrity of the containers. This phenomenon, however, is an interaction of structure and the fluid, namely oil, and is difficult to be analyzed using computer simulation codes. Owing to the FSI capability of Abaqus and Fluent via MpCCI, the phenomenon has been within the range of simulation. Authors tried to analyze the sloshing using the real seismic acceleration at Hachinohe earthquake in Japan and report the result.

Customer Papers

Thermal Barrier Coatings (TBC) have been used for almost three decades for heat insulation in high-temperature components to increase efficiency. Reliable diagnostic techniques that are practical to implement are needed to identify the location and severity of degradation in TBCs to protect against premature TBC failure. Luminescence spectroscopy has been utilized in detecting early damage, as it exhibits monotonic changes in the spectral characteristics with damage. Nevertheless there is still no agreement on what are the best spectral parameters that indicate damage. A new Finite Element model is presented, which is used to make realistic predictions of TBC lifetime, from as-manufactured to critically damaged.

Customer Papers

Expandable sand screens are a relatively novel sand control system, which are used to control the ingress of solids in oil and gas reservoirs with weak and unconsolidated formations. They combine the ease of installation of conventional screens with the borehole support of a gravel pack. The results from the FEA modeling compares favorably with data from earlier, large scale, experiments. This satisfactory outcome increases confidence in the modeling and has allowed us to design models for field applications.

Customer Papers

Structures in general are subject to uncertainty due to manufacturing, assembly, environment of work, loads, etc ... This scatter more specifically is associated for example to tolerances of thickness, position, waviness, etc, material mechanical properties distribution, layup alignment axes. All these deviations can be taken into account with stochastic analysis to reduce the total cost of the project considering all the phases of product life (manufacturing, assembly, maintainability...) and make a global robust design. The use of these technologies allows finding improved structures, without an increase of manufacturing non conformities associated with highly optimized structures, and with similar analysis times.

Customer Papers

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, in order to achieve the fastest possible starts without exceeding allowable material stress limits.

Customer Papers

Nearly no load bearing behaviour of reinforced concrete members allows such varied interpretations and complex discussions as the shear behaviour. Especially the three-dimensional problem of the punching shear failure of reinforced concrete members is internationally discussed. Nevertheless up to now, there is no unified design approach or even an overall accepted design model. Especially for large structural members, as they are commonly used in industrial structures and high-rise structures, the experimental background is missing. Because of extensive costs and very high test loads numerical solutions and FE-simulations are indispensable. By using Abaqus, finite-element simulations are currently performed at the institute for reinforced and prestressed concrete structures at the Ruhr-University Bochum.

Customer Papers

The automotive instrument panel is usually constructed with several kinds of polymer materials. Two major roles of the instrument panel are i) holding the instruments, such as velocity meter, tacometer, and control knobs, etc. and ii) protecting driver and passenger from the critical injury from secondary impact in crash. The thermal creep properties of a polymer are the keys for maintaining the shape through the thermal cycles, and the rate-dependencies and energy absorption characteristics are the keys for the crash performance. The creep behavior of a polymer is the main concern of this paper.

Customer Papers