SIMULIA Resource Center

Competitive sailing requires robust part design in order to withstand the higher loads placed on the boat and its components during aggressive racing. At the same time, the designs must be as lightweight as possible to remain within race-class weight requirements. Advanced engineering company iXent was called on by the owner of racing sailboat Alegre 3 to contribute to strengthening and lightweighting a key component design.

Tech Notes

Continuous fiber prepreg tape can be transformed into platelets and used as an advanced compression-molding compound. The resulting prepreg platelet molded composite (PPMC) has a meso-scale heterogeneous structure, which means that the stress concentrations resulting from interactions between individual platelets and semi-laminated composition of the system defines the PPMC effective mechanical properties. In the present investigation, the authors developed a computational finite-element model to simulate the effective stiffness and strength of a PPMC tensile coupon. Progressive failure analysis is used to study the damaged deformation up to ultimate failure in full-sized virtual coupons with explicitly modeled stochastic meso-scale morphology and deterministic platelet size to assess the variability of PPMC stochastic effective mechanical properties.

Customer Papers

A university researcher received a request from a medical school to provide simulations of the human foot that would help surgeons plan corrective treatment for flatfoot disorder. Human tissue modeling is one of the most difficult simulations to perform and the researcher’s existing FEA software was not up to the task. Abaqus FEA from Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA provided advanced nonlinear capabilities, automatic meshing, and fast pre-and post-processing for contact, deformation and stress, plus quality graphics.

Tech Notes

In order to apply thermoelectric generator (TEG) into engine exhausted heat recovery system, the thermoelectric module needs to be compact balancing between structural durability and thermal transfer characteristics. However, the manufacturing process of the thermoelectric module, which can be classified into two categories, is highly complicated. The first process is to bond the Cu electrodes onto the top and bottom surfaces of thermoelectric element, while certain residual stress and deformation are observed in itself. The second process is the module manufacturing which assembles large numbers of the bonded single elements with residual stress on the exhausted plate. In this paper, we explored the multi-scale analysis for the whole manufacturing process of thermoelectric module by using Abaqus/Standard.

Customer Papers

To replace missing teeth with dental implants is a common and clinically proven treatment option. However, there are still several complications with this kind of treatment. Besides biological complications like periimplantitis, the most common technical complication is loosening or fracture of the screw which is mainly due to fatigue. The purpose of this investigation is to appraise a ranking of the fatigue behavior of six different implant systems by finite element method (FEM) simulations in order to figure out the "worst case" implant system for the fatigue testing according to ISO standard 14801. The simulations were conducted according to the guidance of the US Food and Drug Association (FDA) "Reporting of Computational Modeling Studies in Medical Device Submissions".

Customer Papers

Customer Papers

The SIMULIA Living Heart Human Model (LHHM) is a platform to study various heart diseases and to evaluate the effectiveness of various devices. While previous studies have shown that LHHM‐based simulations can be used for early‐stage effectiveness assessments of devices, such as an annuloplasty ring, more thorough assessments and optimization of device function require a more rigorous framework. In this study, we focus on such a framework for Mitral Valve (MV) function. This study demonstrates that the Living Heart Human Model can be used as a platform to better understand cardiac functioning of healthy hearts, which then allows the potential to introduce disease states, and to simulate effectiveness of potential treatment options in increasingly rigorous manners.

Customer Papers

In daily practice, the identification of the mechanical pathogenesis of foot diseases mostly relies on observation, patient history, clinical assessment, medical imaging, and in rare cases on gait analysis. Based on the results of this plethora of tests, orthopaedic surgeons use a variety of treatments with respect to clinical guidelines to restore and maintain proper bony alignment and muscle balance. Despite improvement of clinical and radiographic parameters, a growing body of evidence finds that one-type-surgery-suits-all approach does not ensure a restoration of function. Inter-subject anatomical heterogeneity, the complexity of the foot and the inability to assess the internal foot loading conditions preclude one-type-surgery-suits-all approach.

Customer Papers

As additive manufacturing (AM) evolves to become a more viable production solution in terms of cost, quality, and time, the need for predictive simulation of the process grows as well. After testing several commercial offerings to see how well they could predict deformation of various parts, Abaqus was found to be the most promising option and chosen for a more in depth analysis. The scope of this particular project was to examine the effects of certain simulation choices – from basics (mesh, time stepping, element type) to unique AM convergence techniques (full/partial activation, expansion time constant, follow deformation, etc.). Hundreds of simulations were run in Abaqus with various permutations and the resulting response on the final deformation and stress state was tracked.

Customer Papers

Prestressed concrete crossties have become an important component of the railroad track structure as loading demands have been increasing. However, several premature failure patterns of concrete crossties, including the splitting/bursting failure, are of concern to the railroad community owing to their adverse effect on track integrity and safety. Previous studies demonstrated that small-scale pretensioned concrete prisms had excellent correlations with concrete ties in the bond performance, and similar prisms are being used to establish the splitting/bursting performance of concrete ties. This parametric study focuses on characterizing the splitting/bursting damage of prestressed concrete prisms during the de-tensioning process with respect to the design parameters of the prisms and the concrete release strengths.

Customer Papers

Mold Cooling channel design directly impacts the cooling efficiency, temperature uniformity, and cycle time, and is also one of the key factors which influences the overall quality of injection molded plastic products. In this paper, we describe a project involving the mold cooling design optimization for the Impeller of a HVAC blower unit. Conventional cooling channel design is compared and contrasted with a conformal cooling channel design. Conventional cooling channels have straight-line channels which can easily be drilled. However, with increasing complexity of plastic part designs, these conventional channels are too inefficient and can result in long cycle times or worse inferior part quality by increasing part warpage.

Customer Papers

Generally, an automatic transmission is composed of various components in a complicated manner, and each component is subjected to various loads. Among them, the planetary gear, which is an essential component of the automatic transmission, has a particularly complicated structure. Simple models are often used for endurance analysis to evaluate specific parts of a gear set, because it takes a lot of time and resources to construct a system analysis model and perform FEM analysis. However, this approach is sometimes inconsistent with actual phenomena due to excessive boundary conditions and simplified loading conditions. This study compares the process and results between the simplification model for the 'carrier' part of the planetary gear set and the system model including the gear set.

Customer Papers