Composites

Enhancements

Composite Browser
  • Ply drag and drop logic – plies will now be placed above the target ply if dragging up, and below the target ply if dragging down.
  • Material reference and ply 1 direction visualization – orientation review has been moved from the icons at the top of the browser to the ply and laminate context menus, under “Review Orientations.” The behavior is exactly like the existing Review functionality.
  • Zone calculation performance improvements – for certain operations, reordering plies within a laminate and deleting plies from a laminate, performance has been improved.
Solver Zone Property Absorption and Laminate Realization
  • Solver attributes are now taken into account for both realize and absorb in OptiStruct, Nastran and Abaqus profiles.
  • An option to delete ply based entities has been added to Laminate Realize. This should be used if the model, or properties will undergo further changes after realize. If the model is simply being exported to the solver, it can remain off.
Composite Stress Toolbox
  • Engineering constants analysis computes transverse shear properties for plies, laminates and zones which contain materials that include G23, G13 definition, even if corresponding Poison's ratios are missing. Supported material types: OptiStruct MAT8, and Abaqus ABAQUS_MATERIAL - Elastic: Type - LAMINA.

Known Issues

Performance of operations within a laminate on large models
As a workaround, a ply with no shape can be temporarily be placed in the laminate and performance will improve significantly.

Resolved Issues

  • Composite Browser context menu stuck on white space options after deleting an entity.
  • Ply orientations redrawn after ply orientation update.
  • General undo/redo cleanup in Composite Browser.
  • On spreadsheet import, shapes not assigned to plies.
  • MAT8 STRN option for strain based allowables instead of stress based allowables are now taken into account by the First_Ply_Failure method of the certification browser correctly.
  • Poisson’s ratio 13 and 3D stiffness and compliance matrices are now computed based on the Poisson’s ratio 31 in OptiStruct MAT9OR material card by computing ny_13 = E_1/E_3*ny_31.
  • Result export (via CTRL+C and CTRL+V) now only contains selected values, including transverse shear moduli and Poisson’s ratios.