Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) Applications to Consumer Products

Manufacturing consumer products and among them disposable absorbent products is very complex, not only due to the number of components that are assembled together, modified and packed but also because it has to be done at very high speed in order to compete in the ever more competitive disposable absorbent products industry. Creating models to represent such complex processes is very challenging for the above reasons and others like the very small thickness of the materials and their particular properties. Representing these processes using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been a growing practice at The Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G) for quite some time and in recent years complexity has been added to the models by including fluid representations, therefore developing Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) models which in many cases are needed to better represent the processes we want to model. In this paper some basic settings of FSI models are described. By using the *Constrained_Lagrange_In_Solid keyword and other necessary keywords it is possible to simulate the interaction of the flimsy structures representing the disposable absorbent products materials with the air that surrounds them, while traveling at high speed. Then the paper goes on to showcase some of the models that have been successfully developed and validated (trim removal, folding and component ribbon handling), all of these models involve the interaction between flimsy structures and air. Validation of the models has been very important to gain confidence in the capabilities and some of the validation data is shared in this paper which shows great agreement between the models’ predictions and the data collected during the experiments. This paper demonstrates how FSI models developed using LS-DYNA® successfully represented manufacturing processes of disposable absorbent consumer products involving flimsy structures and fluids interacting at high speed.