Bridge and other infrastructure failures have been generating significant headlines in the United States. The German state Hesse has a new idea: plastic composite bridges. Europe’s’ first road bridge made of fiber-reinforced thermoset polymer opened recently, spanning a federal highway north of Frankfurt. The initial cost of the materials is higher, but there are long-term maintenance benefits. The pultruded polymer structure is also less than one-fourth the weight of a pre-stressed concrete superstructure. It’s not a giant bridge – just 89 feet long by 16 feet wide. It weighs 80 metric tons.
Some big problems had to solved, including adhesive bonding of the sections and testing. Materials being evaluated for bridge construction include glass and carbon fibers and matrix polymers of vinyl ester, epoxy and polyester. Officials say the new German bridge, located in the town of Friedberg, is expected to last 50 years without repairs. The bridge is made of FRP polymer glued to steel sections. The bridge was prefabricated and assembled on site in one day.
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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