Filament Winding FEA

There is currently huge commercial interest in the development of high-performance Composite Pressure Vessels (COPVs). A significant driver of this is in the field of low emission and renewable energy technologies for transportation. In transportation applications vessel weight/volume ratios are key which means that high performance composites are the only commercially viable solution. The filament winding process is highly suited to the manufacture of COPVs. The winding process can be fully automated, is highly repeatable and allows the placement of continuous high strength fibres in highly efficient manner to meet the demanding structural requirements. Because of the potential risks of such high pressures rigorous design and analysis of COPV's is required.

A thick wall COPV is built up of a large number of filament wound layers and particularly in the dome areas the fibre direction and layer thickness is continuously varying. This creates a problem for making detailed and representative finite element models of the thickness and fibre architecture. The solution to this problem is to employ software tools that understand the physics, materials, geometry and practically considerations that can allow a designer to simulate feasible winding structures and create a seamless data flow into world class FEA analysis tools. Established way back in 1984 Cadfil is a leading solution for creating winding programs for both CNC and Robot winding systems. Cadfil has many direct interfaces into many leading Finite Element Analysis systems, Including MSC Nastran, NX Nastran, Optistruct, ABAQUS, LS-DYNA, ANSYS and ESACOMP. There are also generic outputs (CSV Tables etc).