INTRODUCTION OF A COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH FOR THE DESIGN OF COMPOSITE STRUCTURES AT THE EARLY EMBODIMENT DESIGN STAGE
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Marco CantaMESsa, Gaetano Cascini, Dorian Marjanovic, Serena Graziosi
Author: Klein, Daniel; Malezki, Waldemar; Wartzack, Sandro
Series: ICED
Institution: Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany
Section: Design Methods and Tools - part 2
Page(s): 105-114
ISBN: 978-1-904670-69-8
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
The imminent climate change, the increasing environmental pollution or the dwindling of resources - all these points have made lightweight design more and more relevant for many different industries. Whenever masses in motion can be reduced, the energy efficiency, and therefore, the sustainability of a product is increased. A common way to reduce the weight of technical products or systems is the use of lightweight materials like aluminium or titanium. However, over the last few years and decades a novel material class has become more and more popular in lightweight design - the so called composite materials where a weak matrix material is reinforced with fibres. The aim of this paper is to show the challenges in the design of composite structures and, for the first time, to give a complete overview of a novel computational design approach which was developed over the last few years. It should be pointed out here that the regarded composite parts in this article are thin-walled parts made of endless CFRP with an unidirectional fibre reinforcement.
Keywords: Lighweight Design, Virtual Engineering (VE), Computational Design Synthesis, Design For X (DfX), Early Design Phases