An important part of designing composite structures is fulfilling performance and reliability targets under operational loads. Most structures are subject to quasi-static or transient phenomena where implicit time integration is sufficient. However, when engineers want to understand the structural behavior under short duration events, explicit time integration methods are necessary. Common scenarios include assessing passenger safety in a vehicle crash event, predicting the damage state of consumer goods in a drop scenario, or predicting the effects of a bird strike on an aircraft and the impact on its ability to land safely.

Composite models may exhibit complex lay-up patterns when they involve multiple layers, local reinforcements, and different materials and orientations. While defining lay-ups in LS-PrePost is tedious and prone to errors, ACP provides all the functionality needed to generate parametric composite models efficiently and accurately. You can use these composite models for both implicit analyses in Ansys Mechanical APDL and explicit analyses in LS-DYNA.

The example that follows shows how to set up a composite model for a bird strike analysis within Ansys Composite PrepPost for an explicit simulation within Ansys Workbench LS-DYNA. In principle, the workflow corresponds to the implicit structural analysis of a composite shell model. The modeling steps that have specific application to the Workbench LS-DYNA analysis are given special attention. For example:

 The Workbench project file can be downloaded here: Bird Strike Project File