J-Composites/Compression Molding - Introducing New Simulation System for FRP Composites

Composite materials like fiber reinforced plastics (FRP) are becoming more widely used in the automotive industry and have been found very effective in reducing vehicle weight. Recently, discontinuous long carbon fiber reinforced plastics are increasingly used for lightweight structural parts with high stiffness, strength and energy absorption performance. Compression molding is considered one of the most efficient manufacturing processes to mass produce FRP parts for automotive applications. Compression molding can form discontinuous long fiber reinforced plastics into complex shapes with relatively low manufacturing cost and short process time. LST and JSOL developed new compression molding simulation techniques for discontinuous long fiber reinforced plastics using a beam-in-solid coupling function in LS-DYNA®. Then JSOL developed a modelling tool called J-CompositesⓇ/Compression Molding to generate an input deck for this new compression molding simulation. In this paper, main features of J-Composites/Compression Molding are introduced and the latest compression molding simulation result of a large scale component model created by J-Composites/Compression Molding is presented.