FEA Package for fatigue analysis of laminar composites

[chaz64]

I've been out of the FEA user community for over ten years now but, prior to that I had twelve years experience with a variety of implicit codes, mostly ANSYS, NASTRAN and ABAQUS.

I've recently taken over a company that makes composite components for the medical devices industry and we are using ProE/Mechanica as our CAD/FEA solution.

I'm interest in performing fatigue and delamination studies on laminar composite springs that are subject to relatively large deflection and I'd like to get some (independent) views on how best to do this.

Many thanks!

 

[gwolf2]

Composite fatigue is tricky but doable. You only need elastic material properties so the choice of FE codes becomes quite wide.

I just wrote down how to do it but realised that it was proprietary data and had to delete it - sorry I can't help more.

The difficult part is getting the fatigue data (expensive) and the method (there may be some public domain approximations).

Good luck.

gwolf

 

[rstupplebeen]

If you need to analyze composites or have large deformation my recommendation is Abaqus. I have not combined those 2 with fatigue in the past though.

What company do you work for I would love to see some example products because bio-mechanics and composites are both of particular interest to me. I hope this helps.

Rob Stupplebeen

 

[chaz64]

Thanks for your help guys .... I'm pretty sure that ABAQUS is the way to go here

 

[gwolf2]

ABAQUS will serve you very well in all respects - it is my recommended package for all things if you have the money, have fun.

gwolf