Analysis Guidelines and Functionalities of the CATIA Native FEA Solver for Composite Materials

The emergence of commercial FEA solvers was a significant breakthrough that boosted the accuracy and complexity of engineering design. While composite materials are special materials, their mechanical properties can be custom made by considering the needs and requirements of the design problem. Given the rapidly expanding global consumption of composite materials, access to FEA solvers capable of assigning these materials is an absolute requirement.The CATIA software is a platform for designing, analyzing, and manufacturing of parts. However, there is no meaningful documentation in the public domain exploring the finite element functionalities of CATIA software for composite materials. Isotropic materials are used in numerous references investigating the CATIA FEA solver; however, the extension to composite materials has been lacking. The present study investigates two phenomena: (1) the procedure to import composite material properties into the Generative Structural Analysis workbench, and (2) the pre-processing and the post-processing toolbars and functionalities pertaining to this matter. The thesis does not address the CAD modelling aspects of the composites per se since there are many references available concentrating on such issues in the CATIA public literature.The composite models are selected from different scenarios labeled as benchmark problems. The results generated by CATIA’s native FEA solver for the static, dynamic, and buckling cases are compared with other tools available to the engineering community. These tools encompass the Classical Lamination Theory and two commercial CAE codes, known as ABAQUS and ANSYS