modeFRONTIER® Superstar in Los Angeles, CA-USA

Ozen Engineering Inc, and its Italian partner, the EnginSoft Group have presented an innovative procedure, specifically developed for the study, analysis, design and optimization of structures made of composites during the SAMPE '08 exhibition in Long Beach (California). This new procedure allows a complete integration of ESAComp, the software for the design of composite materials, with the ANSYS Finite Element package, by taking advantage of the design and multi-objective optimization environment modeFRONTIER®, developed by ESTECO (www.esteco.com). Such a procedure makes it possible to manage, in a deterministic way, the problem of optimizing the designs of composite structures by complying at the same time with the constraints that the problem and/or the regulations may require. In detail, by coupling modeFRONTIER® and ESAComp, it was possible to determine the number, orientation and type of rolled sections to be used in constructing the actual optimal composite structure of the hull of a sailing race boat.

The whole spectrum of possible configurations could be considered and the accordance with the design criteria and structural/legal specification was satisfied. The ANSYS finite element package was employed in this case, but the procedure can be easily employed with any other commercial Finite Element Package. The optimization capabilities of modeFRONTIER® can be also employed for calibrating/tuning numerical models so as to match experimental data, thus performing the “so-called” inverse engineering. With respect to this, a study over a composite helmet has been recently conducted. In this very case the coupling involved modeFRONTIER®, ESAComp and the LS-Dyna explicit finite element code. However, the procedure is very general and can be employed with any other commercial CAE tool, even for Computer Fluid Dynamics (CFD) problems. Stochastic Analysis, Robust Design and Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) studies are other capabilities offered by modeFRONTIER®. During the SAMPE'08 (www.sampe.org/events/2008LongBeach.aspx) conference, Ozen Eng. Inc. gave a full presentation of the above mentioned products/procedures and presented a paper on “Process Integration and Multi-Objective Design Optimization as New Design Methodologies for the design of Composite Structures” [ID L181]. The presentation took place on Wednesday May 21during the Session Design and Analysis II of the conference. Many conference attendees, especially from the main industrial aerospace industries expressed interest in the new multi-objective design capabilities offered by ESAComp and modeFRONTIER®.

Ozen Engineering staff also visited the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and started a preliminary negotiation with the local community of Professors and Scholars with the objective to implement the modeFRONTIER® University Program in USA.