Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, based software provider VISTAGY Inc says BAE Systems' upgrade to FiberSIM® 2009 will enable the company to take advantage of advanced design capabilities and compress development cycle times as it migrates from the CATIA V4 to CATIA V5.
BAE Systems has used FiberSIM for more than a decade to design complex composite parts – including wing skins, intake fairings, fuselage skins and spars – for a variety of aerospace programmes, such as the Joint Strike Fighter, Eurofighter Typhoon, various Airbus programmes and, most recently, for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
“We conducted a thorough evaluation of other options but we’ve worked successfully with VISTAGY for over a decade so our confidence in that partnership certainly played a significant role in our decision to continue to invest in FiberSIM,” says Bill Sargeant, who manages the Airframe Design research and technology team, for the Autonomous Systems and Future Capability business stream at BAE Systems. “We’re facing the challenge of compressing our product development cycle by 75% compared to past programs so FiberSIM’s ability to streamline the composites engineering process will be a big help in supporting this effort."
“Furthermore, we need to be able to access and migrate legacy data so we can leverage our engineers’ experience as we transition from CATIA V4 to V5," he adds. "FiberSIM is fully integrated into both versions of the product and provides a solid upgrade path to support our needs in this area.”
“We found that FiberSIM is easy to use and very robust,” confims Tony Rudd, senior support engineer at BAE Systems. “The flexible design approach provides the ability to quickly implement changes, and the way the technology mimics the composite manufacturing process and flow gives the user a lot of power while being quite straightforward to use.”
