Digimat‘s new release provides improvements addressing its wide range of material application. Design engineers and material experts will find valuable improvements to better design composite structures and understand material behavior.
Lower cost of early design values with virtual material engineering
Early design values are more and more crucial with shortening design cycles in both the automotive and aeronautic industries with virtual material engineering playing a larger role in saving time and cost. Digimat-FE virtual lab capabilities have been reinforced to provide better microstructure of both short fiber reinforced plastics (SFRP) and continuous fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP). High fiber content microstructure and realistic fiber positions are now easily achievable. In addition, a new solver has been added (FFT solver) to shrink time of virtual data generation, allowing to speed up virtual material screening and engineering.
Enriched virtual allowables with advanced modeling and effect of defects
Design values relies on numerous testing and replicates to compute allowables with significant cost and time expanses. To virtually capture physics involved naturally leads to reduced time and cost by simply completing test campaigns with numerical simulations. Digimat-VA is the right platform for this and has been enriched in this release. Meanwhile richer modeling is deployed, to help material departments with defects such as porosity, out-of-plane waviness, and delamination. Digimat-VA has been enriched with a dedicated environment, allowing to better estimate effect of defects to compute margin factors and define appropriate tolerances.
Fatigue solution for reinforced plastics
Latest trends indicate a strong focus on advanced properties of SFRP. Design engineers are looking for tools and modeling approach to accurately predict fatigue lifetime to design parts. In continuity of efforts initiated with previous release partnering with DSM, Digimat-RP has been upgraded to account for local plasticity in fatigue lifetime computation under constant load amplitude.
Sheet molding compound (SMC) modeling deployment
To support OEM and Tier ones with SMC material modeling need, a dedicated approach has been deployed up to structural crash application with Digimat-RP. A specific modeling approach has been set up to overcome SMC challenges: varying anisotropy, damage propagation, and weld line weakness.
Additive manufacturing solution consolidation
The Digimat-AM printer database has been enriched to help further facilitate design engineering. Additive manufacturing simulation results post-processing has been improved to face printed part challenges such as investigating skin-core effects related to thermal history.
Increased content of Digimat-MX database by supporting material suppliers
Access to advanced material data is key to achieving high fidelity structural analysis and process simulation, whether for injection molding or additive manufacturing applications. The Digimat-MX database provides direct access to validated off-the-shelf material models from a wide range of material suppliers. This new release further strengthens the content of the public database. Two new material suppliers are added: MarkForged for part performance and Sintratec for additive manufacturing processes. New material systems and models are included from Asahi-Kasei Corporation, DSM, DuPont Performance Materials, Radici, Solvay Engineering Plastics, Solvay Specialty Polymers and Sumika. Overall 17 new material systems have been added, corresponding to 1 040 new models, including fatigue and creep data.
To support material suppliers in the enrichment of the Digimat-MX database, new calibration workflows are available for thermal expansion and creep, allowing to save time and gain quality in their models.
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