Copyright© 2010 Nilakantan Composites. All rights reserved.

About DYNAFAB™

DYNAFAB™ is a preprocessor with a user-friendly GUI used to automatically create finite element models of 2D and 3D fabrics such as plain weave and unidirectional architectures. Creating high quality finite element meshes of these fabrics is time consuming and a laborious task. Each time the mesh needs to be refined, it has to be redone from scratch. Similarly, each time the fabric’s geometry or architecture is varied, as is normally done during a parametric study, the whole model needs to be set up from scratch. Some research codes exist that can create CAD geometries of fabrics. However those models use idealized cross sections and suffer from excessive penetrations which would lead to drastic errors during a finite element simulation unless corrected. Further, those codes cannot automatically create high quality hexahedral meshes. There currently is no other commercially available software that can automatically create high quality finite element meshes of fabrics. To fill this void in the scientific community, DYNAFAB™ was created. Researchers can now devote their time to the actual simulations and physics of the problem rather than spending hours and days setting up finite element meshes. DYNAFAB™ creates LS-DYNA® formatted keyword inputfiles that are ready to use in a simulation. Therefore users do not need to purchase very expensive third party CAD and preprocessing software. Further if any changes that are needed in the model, they can be done using LSTC’s free preprocessor LSPrePost®. However if users already possess licenses to other modeling and simulation software such as Altair Hypermesh®, CATIA®, Patran®, Abaqus®, and ANSYS®, then the model created using DYNAFAB™ can be easily imported into those software using standard built-in templates. Thus DYNAFAB™  doesn’t necessarily need to be used only with LS-DYNA®. DYNAFAB™ is currently designed to run only on a Windows based computer. Please join the newsletter subscriber’s list using the link on the left to keep yourself up to date with the latest news and developments. We welcome any and all feedback and comments. Contact information can be obtained using the link on the left.

DYNAFAB™ will officially launch in March 2010 !!

Nilakantan Composites