Benefits of CATIA for Composite Design & Manufacturing

Paying attention to the careful design and material selection guidelines in the design and manufacturing of composites is vital to ensuring structural integrity of parts. Without adherence to guidelines in designing composites, this can lead to the development of poor quality parts, which isn’t going to help anyone.

This is extremely important as the benefits of strong composite designs include the production of lightweight, impact resistant and strong parts compared to standard metal products. Ultimately, this leads to the manufacturing of better quality parts for a better quality product, especially when these parts will be used in aircrafts where safety protocols are extremely stringent. 

The production of better quality parts is also important due to Governmental crackdowns on carbon emissions, particularly for aircrafts. But with composite design, the reduction in fuel costs and carbon emissions based on the production of lightweight structures helps to adhere to Governmental pressures.

This is where CATIA comes in. CATIA products take a process-centric solution in the designing of composite parts, ensuring compliance with composite part design best practices and the manufacturing of high quality parts.

So here’s 4 benefits of CATIA for Composite Design and Manufacturing which can help you to improve your production of high quality parts.

Geometrical Configurations 

The design of some composites parts can become quite complex due to the geometrical configuration of such parts. This means it’s a lot easier to make mistakes in ensuring accuracy during design.

But CATIA Composites Design 3 (CPD) is able to support a variety of composite configurations. With CATIA CPD, you are able to manage multi-part geometries including core-stiffened parts better than you would with standard composites design solutions.

Save Time and Money

The CATIA V5 relational design change management capabilities use automatic updates, lessening the impact of changes to the design-to-manufacturing process. Through automatic updates in the engineering design phase, you don’t have to restart the full design process all over again, allowing you to achieve considerable savings in time and money.

Productibility Checks

With CATIA, in-depth productibility checking enables users to predict the behaviour of composites across complex surfaces. For example, users are able to predict manufacturing problems such as wrinkles and can take action to correct any inadequacies and generate flat patterns. This helps to produce a good quality part without incurring unnecessary costs in time or money.

Integration 

CATIA Composites Design 3 also integrates across production systems such as Laser Projection which aids in reducing the lay-up time, Resin Transfer Molding Simulation, and Fiber Automation Placement amongst others. The advantage is that CPD can then be used by any companies, whatever the machine providers are. 

So there you have it. Four benefits of CATIA for Composites Design and Manufacturing are;

• Manage multi-part geometries better than standard composite design solutions.
• Save money and time by avoiding restarting the design process with automatic updates.
• Predict the behaviour of composites across complex surfaces, taking corrective action where necessary.
• Integrate CATIA CPD across production systems.

See how CATIA Composites Design 3 can help you to improve your aerospace design and manufacturing processes by downloading the eBook.