Formability Analysis System For Sheet Metal Product Design Based On CATIA V5-SFA

In automobile panel production industry, many companies tried to develop new product by CAD/CAE cooperation in order to improve quality, reduce costs and development cycle. However, the application didn't achieve unitized concurrent environment between CAD and CAE. If a low-price CAD/CAE seamless integration system can be developed and actually meet the practical needs of automobile industry, it can be predicted that civil automobile industry will be more competitive and stronger by widely using finite element simulation method.This research is supported by NSF named: "The Independent Research of High-speed Simulation and Optimal Process Design aiming at the Formability of Automobile Panel" (NO.50575080) and National 863 Program: "The Formability and Optimal Process Design Based on the Simulation of Automobile Parts"(NO. 2006AA04Z140).In this paper, the basic information of CATIA V5 was studied firstly, which included the system and technical features and software component infrastructure. Secondly, The re-developing technique based on CATIA is discussed,such as principle, API, tools,method and steps. Seamless integration between CAD and CAE was key ideas, according to which, system structure, UI and module interface was designed. The system was modularized and divided into there parts: Pre- and Post- processor and solver. By Object-oriented method, framework, data structure and data flow program was designed. Then, The key technique - Document Data Processing - was discussed in detail, which included Analysis Document,Analysis Features,Field Model,Solution Sets, all of them dominated the inner data interaction, storage and processing. In order to complete the interactive application, the C++ object, document window, workshops and workbenches, commands and command headers are studied. At last, the comparison of experimental and simulation results indicates the accuracy and practicality of the system.SFA (Sheet Forming Analysis Environment Based on CATIA) is a formability analysis system for sheet metal product design and re-developed based on CATIA. Compared with inite element simulation system, SFA provides complete Pre- and Post- processor and solver,which can generate surface mesh,set processing parameters and conditions,compute,display isoline and generate report, The user interface consistent with CATIA and can be operated conveniently, The solver is based on an improved inverse approach of FE and DKQ shell element,which can be applied to predict formability problems during product design stage effectively and rapidly, The system is integrated seamlessly with CATIA, As a result,data loss can be avoided during model transformation.