Efficient Simulation of Smart Materials with VABS Software
Technology Category
- Sensors - Infrared Sensors
- Sensors - Thermal Conductivity Sensors
Applicable Industries
- Buildings
- Construction & Infrastructure
Use Cases
- Virtual Prototyping & Product Testing
About The Customer
The customers for the VABS software are engineers and researchers working with smart materials and structures. These include those working on wind turbines, helicopters, and other applications where smart structures are used. Smart structures, often functioning as actuators and sensors, are used in applications such as vibration suppression, shape control of composite plates, and aeroelastic stability augmentation. The software is particularly useful for those dealing with the behavior of engineering structures composed of smart materials working under multiple physical fields: mechanical, thermal, electric, and magnetic.
The Challenge
The challenge lies in the efficient and accurate simulation of smart materials, specifically initially curved and twisted anisotropic beams such as those found on wind turbines and helicopters. These materials are complex due to their arbitrary sectional topology and the coupling effects between multiple physical domains. Direct analysis of these composite beam structures is computationally expensive, even with advanced supercomputers. The use of beam theory reduces computational cost significantly, but the lack of reliable mathematical modeling and analysis for smart systems presents a major barrier. This is due to the difficulty in modeling coupling effects and the anisotropic and heterogeneous nature of composite materials.
The Solution
The solution is the Variation Asymptotical Beam Sectional Analysis (VABS) software, a high-fidelity cross-sectional analysis program. It serves as a link between 3D solid and 1D beam models by reducing an original 3D structure to a beam model and recovering the 3D field quantities. The software has been extended to handle multiphysics problems, including thermal-hygro, piezoelectric, piezomagnetic, pyro, and any combination between these physics fields. The software uses the variational-asymptotic method (VAM) to construct a series of composite-beam models for efficient multiphysics beam analysis. The newly developed beam models have been implemented into VABS, which will be released with the new version of the software.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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