Overview

Welcome to the Composites Design User's Guide!
This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the product.
This overview provides the following information:

Composites Design in a Nutshell

Composites Design 3 is an advanced composites process centric solution that allows manufacturers, from aerospace to automotive or consumer goods companies, to reduce the time needed to design composites parts.

It delivers tools to cover both the preliminary and detailed design phases while taking into account, even at the concept stage, the product's requirements for finite element analysis and manufacturability.

Composites Design 3 uniquely delivers a powerful composites design solution with all the advantages of the CATIA V5 architecture: native integration, pervasive knowledgeware capabilities, and CATIA V5 ease of use.

The following products are also available as sub-parts of the Composites Design workbench:

  • The Composites Engineering Design (CPE) product provides process oriented tools dedicated to the design of composites parts from preliminary to engineering detailed design.
    Automatic ply generation, exact solid generation, analysis tools such as fiber behavior simulation and inspection capabilites are some essential components of this product.
    Enabling users to embed manufacturing constraints earlier in the conceptual design stage, this product shortens design-to-manufacturing period.
  • The Composites Design for Manufacturing (CPM) product provides process oriented tools dedicated to manufacturing preparation of composites parts.
    With the powerful synchronization capabilities, CPM is the essential link between engineering design and physical manufacturing, allowing suppliers to closely collaborate with their OEMs in the composite design process.
    With CPM, manufacturing engineers can include all manufacturing and producibility contraints in composites design process.

Before Reading this Guide

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore, we recommend that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products. It also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.

Getting the Most Out of this Guide

To get the most out of this guide, we suggest that you start reading the User Tasks section, which deals with handling all the product functions.
The Workbench Description section, which describes the Composites Design workbench, will also certainly prove useful to find your way around the Composites Design workbench.
Navigating in the Split View mode is recommended. This mode offers a framed layout allowing direct access from the table of contents to the information.

Accessing Sample Documents

To perform the scenarios, sample documents are provided all along this documentation. For more information on accessing sample documents, refer to Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.

Conventions Used in this Guide
To learn more about the conventions used in this guide, please refer to Conventions section.

In addition to these conventions, you can find the following icons in the Composites Design User's Guide:
This icon... Means that the functionality is only available with...

The Composites Engineering Design (CPE) product

The Composites Design for Manufacturing (CPM) product
All functionalities described in this User's Guide are available with Composites Design 3.