OREANDA-NEWS. October 05, 2016. ESI Group , leading innovator in Virtual Prototyping software and services for manufacturing industries, announces the release of its PAM-COMPOSITES 2016 software solution to provide process and design engineers with its full suite of modules to predict, analyze and correct manufacturing defects of composite structural components across the complete manufacturing chain.

The cost-effective solution combines the existing modules of ESI Group with new, innovative enhancements that enable process and design engineers to precisely identify the origin of defects and manufacture composite parts with a higher degree of accuracy; reducing material waste and obsoleting the need for costly and time consuming trial and error approaches.



Using the ESI PAM-COMPOSITES solution, process and design engineers can tailor simulations to the exact nature of the composite material and their unique shop floor environment to improve process stability and reduce manufacturing defects for a vast range of composites manufacturing processes. These include: draping, thermoforming, Liquid Composites Molding (LCM), Resin Transfer Molding (RTM), and curing , as well as two new robot draping processes: Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) and Automated Tape Layering (ATL).

Jacinto Tortosa, CEO at FIDAMC - a Spanish company aiming to consolidate their leadership position in composite material technology - recognizes the contribution of numerical simulation to their success. He states that ESI PAM-COMPOSITES allows them to perform "the analysis and optimization of each individual manufacturing operation" so they can "save cost and speed up project completion, substituting manufacturing trials by simulation ".

In PAM-COMPOSITES 2016, the newly introduced Design of Experiments (DoE) functionality automatically analyzes variations in the composite material and manufacturing process parameters to allow process and design engineers to optimize key influencing parameters and improve process stability.

The new Die Spotting functionality allows process and design engineers to automatically morph existing tools to ensure a perfect contact with the part. This avoids the bridging effects often seen with thermoformed organo-sheet components where resin migration and lack of compaction leads to visible defects. It also allows engineers to avoid the incidence of areas with low fiber content or race tracking during resin injection or infusion.

PAM-COMPOSITES brings together the PAM-FORM, PAM-RTM and PAM-DISTORTION modules into one, competitively-priced bundle within a process-oriented Graphical User Interface to free specialist resources and allow all engineers to use this highly intuitive solution.