MATERIALS
NABLA
COMP
Composite laminate behaviour,
without running FEM
WHAT IT IS
A tool implementing Classical Lamination Theory for composite structures
CHALLENGE
A laminate has more parameters than a metal: material, fibre orientation, volume fraction, resin, layering, thickness
RESULT
Validated against literature data and against a three-point flexural test in the laboratory
01
CHALLENGE
Working out how a laminate behaves is harder than for steel or aluminium, and for an ordinary reason: there are more knobs. Materials, fibre orientation, volume fraction, resin selection, layering and thickness all enter the answer, and changing one changes what the others do.
Doing it properly in FEM is possible and slow. For simple geometries and early decisions, that cost buys very little.
02
SOLUTION
NablaCOMP implements the Classical Lamination Theory directly. The tool lets you:
01
define the mechanical characteristics of the materials
02
define the laminas in terms of material, fibre orientation and thickness
03
define the laminate as a sequence of laminas
04
select the load case and define the loads
05
calculate the deformation of the laminate
Theory on its own is not enough to trust a number, so we ran an extensive campaign of flexural tests to characterise the materials and validate the tool, carried out with a certified partner, the University of Padua.
03
RESULTS
The point is speed at the stage where speed matters: the structural behaviour of simple geometries, without the modelling effort of a finite element analysis that the question does not yet justify.
The tool was validated against literature data, and its predictions compared with a three-point flexural test run in our own laboratory.
