Siemens’ Fibersim Helps Reduce Product Development Time

Fibersim software helps composite material users reduce design and analysis time by up to 80 percent

Siemens

Plano, TexasNov. 14, 2014—Enhancements in the latest release of Siemens’ Fibersim software help industries that use composite materials in their products reduce design and analysis time by up to 80 percent and shorten some design for manufacturing processes by up to 50 percent. Fibersim 13 is an offering of Siemens’ product lifecycle management (PLM) software business unit. The Fibersim portfolio of software for composites engineering is used by numerous leading manufacturers in the aerospace, automotive, marine and wind energy industries.

Version 13 (Fibersim 13) adds new functionality for bi-directional exchange of computer-aided engineering (CAE) and computer-aided design (CAD) data that facilitates the elimination of tedious, error-prone data re-entry. The new capability directly integrates analysis data into the design environment, enabling automatic design updates based on analysis results. It also provides new design-for-manufacturing processes that support optimization for parts designed to match the manufacturing definition and then trimmed to the engineering definition.

“Manufacturing composite products requires a multi-disciplined, concurrent engineering approach in which information is efficiently exchanged between disciplines during all phases of the development cycle,” said Steve Luby, senior vice president of specialized engineering software, Siemens PLM Software. “Exchanging composites information between analysis and design is historically extremely difficult and error prone because the terminology and geometric representations used by each discipline are different. The enhancements in Fibersim 13 improve productivity by enabling engineers to import and update their CAD model from the CAE composite part representation, providing engineers with a tool to efficiently optimize designs.”

Fibersim 13 also extends its integration with Siemens’ Teamcenter software to associate manufacturing datasets—such as flat patterns, laser data and automated deposition data—to the proper model revision and subsequently communicate this information to the factory floor. This delivers complete and consistent datasets to manufacturing, and facilitates the fabrication of products according to the latest design.

Fibersim 13 breaks down the communication barriers between stress analysts and design engineers, which is critical to making smarter decisions that result in better products. Having the ability to easily share data between analysis and design enables engineers to achieve the optimal combination of weight, strength, stiffness, component unitization, assembly and maintenance.

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