JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #114 - July 2017 - 34

SPORTS & LEISURE software
can do a great anything".
Although on many levels an aircraft
wing is certainly more complex than
a bike frame, there are some details in
a bike - such as highly doubly curved
surfaces and joint sections - that are actually more complex than in an airplane.

Screenshot of the HyperSizer Express Finite Element Model (FEM) Viewer shows the optimization of a composite
bike-frame design in progress. The color gradient indicates ply counts. The unique "Wizard" (box in left foreground) automatically powers the underlying software code as the user answers straightforward engineering
questions, making the complicated optimization process extremely easy to use.

aim of supporting the growing number
of other industries adopting composite
materials to offer lighter, stronger and
more durable products. These include
automotive components, sporting goods
such as snowboards and tennis racquets,
medical prostheses, robot parts, boats,
wind turbine blades and bicycles.
The company kicked off its new software

launch with a bike example. To demonstrate the capabilities in Express, it chose
to dive deep into the example of a bike
frame because it contains aspects of all
the challenges that would be seen in
many other industrial applications. The
bike became pretty much the company's
gold standard that said "if we can do a
great composite bike frame design, we

Collier Research
composite engineer
Bertram Stier rides his
own aluminum-frame
bike to the office most
days. There he develops
software tools that
support the design of
lighter-weight composite-frame bicycles,
along with a wide range
of other products.

jec composites magazine / N°114 July 2017

Composite material challenges
The complexities of designing with
composites are many, of course. The
materials are made up of thin layers of
polymers, often reinforced with carbon
fibres as in the case of bike frames.
When composite plies running in different directions intersect at the joints of a
frame, it can be difficult to correctly predict the ply-by-ply stresses and optimize
the design to take into account the large
variety of applied loads on the structure.
Traditionally, there has been a lot of
craftsmanship in bike-making but this
involves many design-prototype-test-redesign cycles. This can take a long time
and cost a lot of money, particularly
when going from aluminium to more
advanced composites. Even after successfully prototyping a bike, it is still
necessary to conduct fatigue tests with
thousands of cycles, and this takes a lot
of time as well.
Designing-in best results
Virtual design with the latest software
tools can shorten product development
time dramatically. An optimization
tool like HyperSizer Express takes the
manufacturing process into account and
provides several options that prevent
the user from a result that is not damage
tolerant. A variety of layup and design
rules can be defined that will result in
the most damage-tolerant design using
the least amount of expensive composite materials.
This type of modelling is now more
accessible to a much wider range of markets and industries and engineers. It is
no longer necessary to be a professional
in composites or optimization to be able
to advance a design with Express.
More information:
ivonne@hypersizer.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #114 - July 2017