SIMULIA Resource Center

The term ‘Unconventional Reservoirs’ is used in the oil and gas industry for hydrocarbon reservoirs that have very low permeability in the magnitude of microdarcy (μd) and therefore rely on artificially introducing pathways for fluids and gases, commonly by using hydraulic fracturing techniques, to enable economic production. This approach of using fracturing stimulation campaigns is also increasingly used to improve production in mature oil and gas fields. Industry estimates for North America indicate that more than half of all stimulation treatments have no impact on production, despite this technique having been in use in numerous onshore wells for more than a decade.

Customer Papers

This work presents a methodology for the analysis of deviations that might be produced during the assembly process of aircraft components using the finite element method as calculation tool. The methodology allows determining the effect that different deviations in the constituent parts may have on the final tolerances of an assembly considering the influence of the joining techniques and the different operations that are usually carried out during such processes. This permits to evaluate if certain deviations in some parts would maintain the final assembly within the specified tolerances or, conversely, may accumulate/propagate negatively generating a non conformity.

Customer Papers

A noticeable number of weight and cost reduction projects are performed with the help of highly improved computer aided engineering (CAE) tools within the vehicle engineering development activities. In this paper, a complete optimization study is applied to a leaf spring with 5 leaves used in the rear axle suspension systems of 6x4 heavy duty trucks by reducing the number of leaves down to 4 together with weight and cost reductions.

Customer Papers

This work presents the development of Finite Element (FE) models to simulate different stages of the design and operation of constrained inflatable structures. Such structures can be used, for example, for sealing segments of underground civil infrastructure such as large pipes or tunnels. In such applications, the confined inflatable structure is prepared for placement, either permanently or temporally, and left ready for deployment, inflation, and pressurization when needed. Once positioned and in operation, the inflatable may be subject to a number of possible loading scenarios and interaction with the surrounding confining environment, which must be evaluated beforehand.

Customer Papers

This paper presents an FEA approach by using a damaged plasticity model to capture the complex thermal and mechanical behavior of cement material. The damaged plasticity model considers the thermal conductivity, tri-axial stress effect, strain-hardening due to plasticity, strain-softening due to cracking and cyclic loading responses. This paper also presents a post-cracking design concept as a new design basis to allow limited cement cracking, providing that the permeability of the cement remains within an acceptable limit. An illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the use of FEA approach and post-cracking design concept for the design of thermal well cements.

Customer Papers

Composite products are gaining wide popularity in industrial production. But after getting impact damage composite parts do not behave as metals due to absence of plasticity. It is very important to analyze BVID damage and residual strength of the composite structure after impact damage. The analysis was carried out on the damage after low velocity impact with use of Virtual Crack Closure Technique and Hashin criteria with corresponding degradation model. For detailed representation of stress fields submodeling technique was used as well.

Customer Papers

In the Fracture Mechanics field, standard industrial methods for crack growth analysis are mainly based on analytic calculations as classical Finite Element approaches are not practical to deal with discontinuities such as fatigue cracks due to the associated high computational costs. eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM) is one of the methodologies that are being developed in the recent years in order to overcome the limitations associated to classical approaches, especially for complex analysis. However limited industrial experience is available to adopt this methodology as a standard practice in the aircraft industry.

Customer Papers

Finite Element Simulation of Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is a problem involving large deformations and is often difficult to solve using the classical Finite Element Method (FEM). Large mesh distortions and contact problems can occur due to the large deformations such that a convergent solution cannot be achieved. Since in ABAQUS, a Coupled Eulerian Lagrangian (CEL) approach has been developed to overcome the difficulties with regard to FEM and large deformation analyses. In this article, this method is investigated regarding its capabilities in simulating FSW process.

Customer Papers

Various elastoplastic constitutive models have been proposed to predict the structural stiffness; most of them use an associated flow rule, which defines a plastic flow direction normal to the yield surface. These models, based on this assumption, have contributed to the predictions of elastoplastic deformations of solid structures in several applications, however, in some cases, they tend to overestimate the structural stiffness. In order to overcome this defect, we have adopted an unconventional elastoplastic model capable of taking into account the generation of the inelastic strain rate not only along the direction normal to the yield surface but also along the tangential one. In this paper the aforementioned model has been studied by applying a series of non-proportional loading paths to a thin wall pier and comparing the results obtained with the ones derived by neglecting the tangential contribution.

Customer Papers

A spreading environmental awareness has prompted a global movement towards leadfree electronic products, in which lead-free tin plating is included. Lead-free tin plating provides good solderability equal to tin-lead plating, however the spontaneous whisker growth on lead-free tin plating is a serious reliability issue. It's imperative to clarify the whisker generation and growth mechanism. So we have developed a multi-scale simulation technique for calculating tin atom diffusion caused by stress gradient induced by temperature change and crystal orientation distribution in polycrystalline tin plating. This multi-scale simulation technique uses molecular dynamics (MD) simulation and a finite element analysis (FEA).

Customer Papers

The presentation is about the application and impact of Abaqus and iSight simulations for corrugated board and packaging within Smurfit Kappa. Abaqus and Isightare used for the development of the prediction formulas, used in our prediction tool PaperToBox. PaperToBox is considered as industry leading. This tool is internally used by 1800 colleagues, resulting in >500 000 calculations per year. Also this tool provides the target values for the newly rolled-out quality measurement system, the “Board Referee”.

Customer Papers

Today, numerous aeroelastic structures are deployed over a finite time period, such as flaps, spoilers, control surfaces, and wheel bay and bomb bay doors. These devices must be both divergence and flutter free. Current state-of-art simulations verify this by applying a quasi-steady assumption that does not require the system to physically deploy within the computations. That is, the structure is assumed elastic but does not possess the “large” motion associated with the device’s path of travel. While these simulations have strong technical merit, especially in the case where a structure is inadvertently locked in a partially deployed position, they are unable to capture all of the relevant physics.

Customer Papers