VABS V3.6 provides optimized meshes for FEA work especially on thin structure such as wind turbine rotor blades.
A provider of efficient high-fidelity modeling software for aerospace, energy composites, and other advanced materials has released VABS 3.6. The developer says the software is the tool of choice for efficient and accurate modeling of composite slender structures such as wind-turbine blades, helicopter rotor blades, high-aspect ratio wings, composite bridges, and other slender structural components.
The main feature of VABS 3.6 is an improved method of optimizing the finite-element mesh. V3.6 is several times faster than the previous version for large problems. The slower I/O (Input/Output) performance reported by some users was corrected. Furthermore, V3.6 can handle larger models, which cannot be analyzed by previous versions.
“For a realistic blade meshed with 200,000 degrees of freedom (DOFs), using a typical laptop, VABS 3.6 takes less than 20 seconds for constitutive modeling (Timoshenko model), while VABS 3.5 takes about 4 min. for constitutive modeling,” says AnalySwift CTO Dr. Wenbin Yu. “Of course, if one uses Dynamic Link Libraries, it will be even faster because a significant portion of time for large problems is spend by I/O with hard drives.”
“While VABS is already known for its efficiency in realistic multiphysics blade modeling, this version is even more appealing by taking it to the next level,” says AnalySwift President Allan Wood. Yu adds that VABS is the only tool capable of rigorously modeling 3D slender solids with complex buildup structures, such as composite wind-turbine blades. The efficient high-fidelity tools offered through AnalySwift let companies bring products to market more quickly and at a lower cost with the best available compromise of accuracy, efficiency, and versatility.
The technology in VABS is said to make it the first efficient high-fidelity modeling tool for composite beams, saving users many orders of magnitude in computing time relative to more complex and time-consuming 3D finite-element analyses, without a loss of accuracy. Engineers can now confidently design and analyze real structures with complex internal construction due to this unique efficient high-fidelity feature. For instance, structures as complex as real composite rotor blades with hundreds of layers are easily handled by a laptop computer.
AnalySwift LLC
www.AnalySwif
Filed Under: Blades, Components, News, Turbines
