Objective: Perform Sizing with a Stiffener Laminate Family.
Add Context with collieraerospace.com
Composite stiffened panels have many manufacturing constraints due to their tooling complexity. HyperX excels at finding low weight designs while satisfying fabrication criteria. Read more here.
The quickest and most robust Sizing approach recommended by Collier Aerospace engineers is Sizing with Laminate Families - where the optimum Sizing result for each Zone is chosen from a predefined selection of Candidate Laminates. Since a Laminate Family consists of Laminates that are related to one another, a design with optimum weight and manufacturability is obtained in less steps. This is no different when Sizing composite panels with Stiffener Laminate Families.
One way or another, a Stiffener Laminate Family must exist in the Database in order to Size with it. Any Stiffener Laminate Families that exist in the Database will be listed Laminate Family Library for review.
To get Stiffener Laminate Family(s), you can:
-
Manually define a Stiffener Laminate Family in HyperX. See Create a Stiffener Laminate Family.
-
Import a previously defined Stiffener Laminate Family from a spreadsheet or another HyperX Database. See Import a Laminate Family.
-
Use HyperX to automatically generate Stiffener Laminate Family from preliminary Sizing results. See Generate a Stiffener Laminate Family.
Note
This is the recommended approach when you do not have a company or program-specific Stiffener Laminate Family for Sizing.
Tip
If you have multiple Stiffener Laminate Families to choose from, try running a Laminate Family Design Study to quickly determine which Family best meets your goals for both weight and producibility.
'Laminate Family' is an option under the 'Material' design variable for the stiffener object(s). To select one from the Library, right-click in the Material field and choose 'Select Laminate Family.'
The skin of the stiffened panel should be assigned a traditional/unstiffened Laminate Family.
Fill in the remaining variables (as is necessary for the selected stiffener concept).
Assign this Design Property to desired Zones.
Make sure all Zones have a Load Property and an Analysis Property. Select the Zones with the Design Property from Step 2 and size them.
Note
The processing time of this operation increases alongside the number of Candidate Laminates in each of your Laminate Families.
HyperX has several tools for visualizing and digesting sizing results. See Tools for Viewing Results for an overview. For this type of Sizing, the following two tools (and their corresponding settings) are commonly used:
-
Legend - The Legend is used to plot zone-based results directly on the model. In this case, some of the more useful legend plots can be found under Sizing Results. See:
-
Sizing Results > Laminates > Total Ply Count (ply count results on each zone, for each object).
-
Sizing Results > Materials (see which laminate from the family was selected for each zone, for both stiffener and skin).
-
-
Cross-Section View - For a stiffened panel, it is often helpful to view the entire cross-section to better understand the Sizing results.
-
Design Results - View individual Design Results for each Zone. The Design Results form is particularly useful for Stiffener Laminate Families. Use the right-click menu to open the form for an individual Zone. Here, you can view the selected Laminate from the Family for that Zone. You can also tune this result by right-clicking in the Material section and clicking 'Edit'.
The resulting form will show you exactly which Laminate from the Family was selected, within the context of the Family. From here, you can select a different Laminate, or add/remove plies in order to adjust the Laminate as desired.
Fabrication Rules
The Fabrication Rules form allows users to specify full Structure Plies - Plies that must always exist (either Zones Sized with this Design Property, Laminate Families being generated, or Discrete Laminates being generated).
Ply Angle Limits
The Ply Angle Limits Form is used to set constraints on the Laminates that may be generated or considered when Sizing.
-
Once Zones have discretely defined Laminate stacks as Sizing results, they can be sequenced across Zone boundaries to generate a set of Global Plies. See Sequencing.
-
Generate Stress Reports to summarize all stress data and design results corresponding to the latest solution. See Stress Reports.