Dupont Schneider electric and Dupont – Stiffness of a Bracket in Reinforced PBT

 

Customer: Schneider Electric

• Global specialist in energy management offerings integrated solutions for safe, efficient and reliable energy.
• Continuously exploring new technologies, developing new products and serving new markets.

 

Customer: Dupont

• Provider of wide range of innovative products and services for markets including electronics, communications, safety and protection.
• DuPont uses DIGIMAT to support their customers in designing innovative composites.

 

Challenge

• Predict structural response of a glass fiber filled PBT polymer bracket
• Accurately design and optimize electrical components existing geometry

 

How to take into account the influence of processing in stiffness prediction?

Digimat Solution

• Reserve engineering of an elasto-plastic DIGIMAT material model
• Computation on the nonlinear stiffness based on fiber orientation prediction performed with Moldflow
• Comparison with experimental stiffness for two different composite materials developed by DuPont:

• 20% glass fiber reinforced PBT polymer, (material 1)
• 50% glass fiber reinforced PBT polymer, (material 2)

• Material damage behavior is not modeled

 

Results
 

• Stiffness at break computed with standard elastoplastic materials leads to 85% error for part in material 1 and to 120% error for part in material 2;
• Stiffness at break computed with elastoplastic DIGIMAT materials leads to 5% error for part in material 1 and to 2.5% error for part in material 2.
• Process design can be trustfully optimized with DIGIMAT to improve part performance at better cost.