Fasteners—usually the less glamorous part of a mechanical design—have been grabbing headlines lately. First it was a lack of fasteners that created (or was at least blamed for) the first delay announcement for the Boeing Dreamliner. Now two metallurgists have put out a book that really dredges up the past. In “What Really Sank the Titanic” , coauthors Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Tim Foecke say that substandard rivets were responsible for the rapid descent of the supposedly unsinkable vessel. Metallurgical testing of 48 rivets recovered from the Titanic showed that slag concentrations were at 9 percent, six or seven percent higher than they should have been. Slag is a brittle byproduct of the iron making process. Design engineers put the weaker rivets in areas expected to see less stress, such as the bow. Unfortunately, that is right where the Titanic scraped an iceberg. McCarty and Foecke postulate that fewer compartments would have burst if better rivets had been used. It’s possible, they say, that the Titanic could even have limped into Halifax. They also suggest that the bad rivets may have resulted from a rush to get the boat built at a time when rivets were in tight supply.
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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