topic Re: Composite materials in Inventor Forum

Composite materials

porcellix5369 — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:34:33 GMT

Hello,

I am just writing to ask a question about the materials library. I am a student and fairly new to inventor. I have been given a pretty basic design task to design and test a component. One stipulation is that one variation of the design must be made using a composite.

I have tried to manually create a new material using material data from various companies on the internet however, I can never seem to find all the information I need to carry out an FEA simulation.

Does anyone know if there is a download or plug in or something that can be installed and give more material examples to use?

Cheers

Re: Composite materials

TheCADWhisperer — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:57:52 GMT

@porcellix5369wrote:
...One stipulation is that one variation of the design must be made using a composite....

Did you instructor let you know that Inventor FEA is limited to linear static analysis of isotropic materials?

You will need to install Autodesk Nastran In-CAD (free to students and schools).

No plug-in or download is needed in order to create your own custom materials - you simply need to identify the material properties.

Re: Composite materials

swalton — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:58:48 GMT

Composites are non-isotropic materials. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotropy)

The FEA built into Inventor Professional is limited to small displacements of linear isotropic materials. Think steel beams, not rubber, carbon fiber, concrete, wood, plastic deformation...

Nastran-InCAD can handle many of the non-linear materials so you may have better results in that package.

Last time we did some preliminary design work on composites, we approximated the material properties with data like this: https://www.clearwatercomposites.com/resources/properties-of-carbon-fiber/ and used a linear solver like Inventor. That gave us an idea of the load capacity of the shape, but it was not sufficient to produce the parts.

We did not try to do detail design of the fiber direction, layers or resin properties of the finished design.

Re: Composite materials

Xun.Zhang — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:52:05 GMT

Hello,

I don't think your request is match title anyway. Assume you are talking about create new material assets for your own library and it is very simple, try to find a similar one i.e. Aluminium and duplicate another one, modify the property as you want and rename to any other name if you want, that's all. Please remember to save it in your library by drag it to your library directly.

Hope it helps!

Re: Composite materials

porcellix5369 — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 06:27:40 GMT

Thanks for the reply’s,

I have downloaded the software but what I am looking for help more with is importing materials or a way of adding more materials to the library.

I am confused as to how this is done in the real world of work as there is so much information needed and little on offer when searching the Internet (unless I am looking for the wrong thing).

For example, units such as the “poisson ratio” and a lot of the thermal properties are not listed with material data sheets online. I wanted to use a nylon/carbon fibre composite but trying to get the right data for the material seems to be impossible for me.

I was hoping you could get material “add-ons” that you could download to increase the standard material library.

Please note though, this is my first ever design task and I am currently only at foundation degree level.

Re: Composite materials

p2523956 — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 13:51:54 GMT

Hi, did you manage to sort this?

Thanks

Interested

Re: Composite materials

leowarren34 — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 20:32:59 GMT

If you want more materials adding the the librar, I have heard some people have files with more materials on, otheriwise you just have define and make the materials you need manually.

Re: Composite materials

Anonymous — Fri, 22 May 2020 06:28:34 GMT

So i seem to have more or less the same task as the topic starter, however i see that in the 2019 inventor CFRPs are in the materials library, and have some properties assigned to them, but anisotropic behaviour is not available, so im a bit confused by the situation, can i use that material from the library for FEA?
many thanks
Alex

Re: Composite materials

swalton — Fri, 22 May 2020 11:08:29 GMT

The underlying assumptions of the Inventor FEA tool have not changed.

it will be very difficult to get accurate predictions of composite behavior using the Inventor FEA module. The closer the behavior of layup is to isotropic, the better the Inventor FEA study.

i suspect that results will very from ‘useful by wrong’ to ‘root cause of the fatal accident’.

A properly configured Inventor Nastran study will give better results.

Re: Composite materials

JDMather — Fri, 22 May 2020 11:16:25 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

...but anisotropic behaviour is not available, so im a bit confused by the situation,

This is really two different questions.

You can create materials with anisotropic properties for modeling, but Inventor analysis tools are limited to using isotropic properties.