Plies
Ply entity representations.
Ply entities are designed to be a simulation representation of a physical ply. To enforce this relationship, a ply entity can be stacked only once in a laminate – the same ply cannot appear multiple times in one or more laminates.
- Material and thickness
- Fiber orientation
- Shape – any complex flat pattern that can be cut from a roll of material
Similarly, an FEA ply is composed of the same data attributes. The modeling process using ply entities should be thought of as analogous to working with a physical ply in manufacturing.
Option | Description |
---|---|
Name | Name of the ply. For solvers which use global names to connect layers from zone to zone, this will also be the name used upon realization. |
Card Image | PLY if user profile is OptiStruct. /PLY if user profile is Radioss. None for other solvers. |
Thickness | Ply thickness. |
Orientation | Fiber orientation. Rotation is applied from the defined material orientation. |
Material | Material entity assigned to ply. |
Drape | Draping result (OptiStruct,
Radioss, Nastran, ANSYS, LS-DYNA) - contains additional
corrections to ply thickness and orientation. Draping result (Abaqus) – *DISTRIBUTIONS which contain thicknesses and orientations which supersede ply thickness and orientation. FiberSim import – contain thickness and orientation corrections due to draping and FiberSim discretization of geometry which is used to generate ply shapes in HyperMesh. |
Shape | Shape of the ply. Can be defined by:
|
Ply System | Optional method to specify reference material orientation for specific ply. Supersedes material orientation defined on elements/properties as direction ply orientation is rotated from. Typically used when importing external composite models. |
List of Base Surfaces | Represent tooling surface of ply. Surfaces containing elements on which to extract FEA shapes during ply realization. Typically only used when importing external composite data. |
Dummy Ply | Used to specify number of layered solid elements generated in shell to solid conversion. Its placement in a laminate also organizes the plies in each solid layer. For example, a laminate with a stacking sequence of [ply1/ply2/dummy ply/ply3/ply4] would generate 2 layered solid elements. |
Integration Points | Abaqus, Radioss, LS-DYNA |
TAMNUF | (OptiStruct only) – Manufactured ply thickness which is used as step during composite size optimization. Optimization results will be n*TAMNUF so a discrete number of plies can be extracted. |