Case Study: Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre improves composite coupon testing accuracy with Hexagon Digimat-VA

Effect of fibre waviness defect on composite coupons

Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) needed to reduce the extensive physical testing required to qualify composite materials for aerospace use, a process made even more time-consuming and costly by manufacturing defects like out-of-plane fibre waviness. To address this challenge, NLR collaborated with vendor Hexagon to utilize its Digimat-VA software for virtual testing and simulation.

Hexagon's solution used Digimat-VA to create accurate virtual models of composite coupons, which incorporated real-world manufacturing defects like fibre waviness. The simulations successfully predicted the compressive strength and stiffness of the materials, both with and without defects, with a high degree of accuracy. This allows NLR to drastically reduce the number of physical tests needed for validation, resulting in significant savings in time, cost, and material waste.

Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre

Bram Noordman

R&D Engineer