CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
4 April 2005
Implementation Investments
Kawasaki Heavy Industries Purchases FiberSIM®
VISTAGY, Inc. announced that Kawasaki Heavy Industries Aerospace Company (KHI) in Kakamigahara City, Japan, has purchased FiberSIM® 5.0 software. KHI is using FiberSIM to design and manufacture several fuselage sections of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner as well as smaller parts for the aircraft.
"FiberSIM's specialized functionality could help to drastically reduce the time and risk involved in both designing and manufacturing the Boeing 787, and is a good fit with the product development processes defined by both KHI and Boeing," says Masahiko Yokota, Senior Staff Officer, Space Systems & Commercial Aircraft Project Engineering Department for KHI Aerospace Company.
"KHI worked closely with us over the last twelve months to develop new, innovative capabilities in FiberSIM 5.0," says Steven C. Luby, president and CEO of VISTAGY. "Powerful new features such as FiberSIM's grid-based design methodology enable KHI engineers to work more quickly and reliably with large-scale aerostructures such as the Boeing 787 fuselage sections."
KHI Aerospace Company is the leading producer of aerospace composite parts in Japan. The company designs and manufactures components for Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, and for the Japanese CX/PX cargo and maritime patrol planes. Because the Boeing 787 has the largest all-composite fuselage ever created, designing and manufacturing the fuselage sections present very unique and complex challenges. KHI is using the Advanced Composite Engineering EnvironmentT and other FiberSIM tools throughout their entire composite design and manufacturing process to overcome these challenges. In particular, KHI plans to use FiberSIM to automatically generate the data needed by fiber placement and tape laying machines used for manufacturing the Boeing 787 fuselage sections.
FiberSIM® is a suite of software that turns major CAD systems into advanced tools for designing and manufacturing composite parts. The software enables engineers to create a complete digital product definition of a composite part within their 3D modeling environment. FiberSIM supports flexible design methodologies for a wide variety of materials and manufacturing processes and automatically generates design details all the way from complex ply and zone drop-offs to variable offset surfaces for mock-up and tooling. The software simulates how composite material deforms over complex curvature and generates manufacturing information including documentation, flat patterns, and data to drive downstream manufacturing equipment. FiberSIM also uses XML technology to share composites data with people and applications throughout the enterprise.
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