CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
31 May 2007
Product News
VISTAGY's FiberSIM® 5.3 Software Supports Quality Planning for Composites
VISTAGY, Inc. announced FiberSIM® 5.3, the latest version of its composite product development suite of software. This new version of FiberSIM provides support for leading analysis packages and new materials, offering the industry's most open and flexible end-to end 3D CAD-integrated composite product development environment. In addition, a new module in the software suite enables quality engineers, for the first time, to consume 3D design data created in FiberSIM to automate quality planning tasks and generate AS/EN/SJAC 9100 forms at the click of a button. The FiberSIM 5.3 suite of solutions, including the quality planning capability, will be available within thirty days.
With FiberSIM 5.3, engineers can now utilize design data to automate traditionally tedious, error-prone quality planning processes for first article and ongoing inspection of products made of advanced composite materials. Thousands of pieces of design data are generated throughout the composites development process. Traditionally, in order to create plans, quality engineers manually compiled this information, interrogated every individual note, ply or annotation, and entered data into a series of required forms that comply with AS/EN/SJAC 9100 specifications. This process is extremely slow and error-prone. Quality plans may take weeks to accomplish, especially for large complex parts and assemblies. In addition, data entry errors could cause part rejections and cost overruns, negatively impacting delivery times, product quality and customer relationships.
Now, with FiberSIM 5.3, quality engineers can more efficiently create inspection characteristics based on 3D product design data generated by FiberSIM and captured in a master CAD model. Quality planners can efficiently consume this data to verify design or ply definition information - ensuring the accuracy of final composite parts - and instantly export data to quality planning documents such as AS 9100 forms 1, 2, and 3 - all at the touch of a button. Since complete product definitions are created in FiberSIM and shared as part of a master CAD model, all downstream processes for manufacturing and quality planning are integrated, greatly improving communication between teams. As a result, quality planners accomplish their tasks in hours, not days or weeks, and ensure that composite products are accurate, conform to all design specifications, and accurately reflect design changes.
In addition to powerful new functionality that automates quality planning, FiberSIM continues to offer improved support for new materials, processes and external applications such as finite element analysis. With broader support and new capabilities, VISTAGY has maintained its leadership position of providing the most open and flexible specialized engineering environment for composites development. The following new capabilities are included in FiberSIM 5.3:
Non-crimped fabric (NCF) material orientation input support - NCF materials may contain two or more layers of fiber tows stitched together. As a result, additional information needs to be provided to accurately represent the orientations of each laminate containing these materials. FiberSIM 5.3 now enables users to enter an ordered series of orientations for the layers of NCF materials, and tracks the orientation of the ply, making it easier for engineering to create part specifications and for manufacturing and quality planning to ensure part accuracy.
Origin stagger capability - Engineers who utilize automated deposition machines are required to stagger the origins of plies of similar orientation. The new capability in FiberSIM 5.3 automates the generation of these staggered origins for a given set of plies, and applies rules to automatically generate a set of laminates based on specifications, making it much faster to design hundreds of plies.
Ply and Weight Tables - Manufacturing engineers are required to create documents such as ply or weight tables that list and calculate information about plies. Now, with FiberSIM 5.3, table generation is a standard action, and engineers can automatically create these tables instantly, with one click of a mouse.
Support for Elfini analysis - FiberSIM 5.3 now supports the Elfini analysis software package for evaluating and simulating composite part performance. VISTAGY software now supports most major finite element analysis packages, advancing its commitment to providing an open and flexible architecture that augments existing IT infrastructure and engineering applications.
"VISTAGY continues to deliver on its vision of a complete, end-to-end model-based process for design, manufacture and quality planning, creating a seamless platform for the 3D development of advanced composite products," said Bob Flory, vice president of product development at VISTAGY, Inc. "Engineers downstream have felt the pain of manually creating inspection plans and generating documents, but with quality planning processes linked to FiberSIM 5.3, they will more efficiently communicate critical data downstream to ensure the development of high-quality, competitive composite products for their customers."
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