Abaqus Technology Brief
TB-05-FWC-2
Revised: April 2007
.
Filament Wound Composite Pressure Vessel Analysis with Abaqus
Summary
Filament winding has become a popular construction
technique in a wide variety of industries for creating com-
posite structures with high stiffness-to-weight ratios. The
difficulty in accurately analyzing the structural behavior of
a filament wound body derives from the continually vary-
ing orientation of the filaments. The standard capabilities
of commercial finite element codes are inadequate to
model the spatial variation of fiber orientation in a
practical way.
In this Technology Brief, an Abaqus/CAE plug-in for the
analysis of filament wound composite pressure vessels is
presented. The application allows the user to create, run,
and post process a finite element model and allows for
detailed specification of structural geometry and winding
layout parameters.
Photo Courtesy of Carleton Technologies Inc, Pressure Technology Division
Background
In the filament winding composite manufacturing process,
filament strands wetted with resin are wound around a
rotating mandrel to form a tubular or axisymmetric Key Abaqus Features and Benefits
structure.
• Abaqus/CAE customization capabilities, such as
Aerospace industry applications of the process include custom output processing, and the ability to ac-
rocket propellant tanks and solid rocket motor casings. cess and modify model and output data bases
Automotive industry applications include high pressure through scripting
fuel storage tanks for hydrogen powered automobiles.
• Abaqus/CAE modeling capabilities, including
The construction of filament wound pressure vessels be- automatic surface-based tie constraints between
gins with the selection of the underlying liner, which con- parts, control of mesh quality through partition-
sists of the cylinder and end domes. A polar boss, which ing, and geometry import
is usually constructed of a metal material, is included at
the apex of one or both of the domes and is used to • Analysis capabilities such as user subroutine
mount end plates, rocket nozzles, valves, or other compo- UVARM to calculate local wind angle and fiber
nents to the pressure vessel. strain output for each element, the inclusion of
nonlinear geometric effects, orthotropic and
Bands of filaments are then wound over the liner in a heli-
hyperelastic material models, and the ability
cal pattern to create layers. After the layers have been
to model permanent yielding of the
wound and cured, the liner is sometimes removed leaving
liner (autofrettage)
only the filament wound composite structure, while in oth-
er cases, the liner remains as part of the pressure vessel.
In some designs a rubber shear-ply is placed over the
liner near the polar boss region to better accommodate
the relatively high shear strains that occur between the bands wrap around the polar boss and return back up the
composite material and the polar boss. dome. In order to model this within Abaqus, a unique ori-
entation and material property must be defined for every
As the bands of filaments are wound from the cylinder element within each helical layer. An Abaqus/CAE plug-in
onto the dome, their meridianal orientation angle changes application has been developed to automate the entire
from that at the cylinder tangent line to 90 degrees as the process of modeling filament wound pressure vessels.
2
Analysis Approach model were created by the plug-in. A plot of the final ge-
The plug-in application allows the user to define all the ometry is shown in Figure 1.
necessary information to create, run, and post process a
finite element model of an axisymmetric wound composite
pressure vessel. The application applies a symmetry
boundary condition at the mid-length point of the cylinder,
so that a half-symmetric model of the complete pressure
vessel is created. If a given tank design has different end
dome geometries, it can be analyzed by creating two sep-
arate models, one for each end of the vessel.
To highlight the features of the application, the analysis of
a geodesic-shaped dome pressure vessel, submitted to
an internal pressure load, is discussed. Each general
step in the process of using the plug-in is explained.
Dome and Cylinder Geometry Definition Figure 1: Axisymmetric geometry of wound composite
Construction of the model begins with the definition of the pressure vessel
dome and cylinder geometry. The dome geometry of the
pressure vessel can be defined several ways. The plug- Winding Layout Specification
in allows the user to define elliptical, spherical or geodesic
After specifying the vessel geometry, the winding layout is
shapes, or a table of individual points may be entered.
defined. The winding layout dialog box is shown in Figure
Additionally, the geometry can be created from a part in-
2. Each layer is assigned a material, wind angle, thick-
stance.
ness and band width.
For this brief, the geometry defining the polar boss and
Two additional properties, end type and thickness frac-
liner was created in Abaqus/CAE by importing the neces-
tion, control the geometry of the layer at the turnaround
sary geometric parts. The geometry of the cylindrical por-
point on the dome. The custom application accounts for
tion of the structure is defined by entering a cylindrical
the thickness buildup as the helical layers approach the
length within the plug-in dialog box. All other parts of the
turnaround point on the dome.
Figure 2: Winding layout table
3
A geodesic or non-geodesic winding pattern may be Figure 3. The regions in blue represent the three primary
specified using the following equation: helical layers automatically generated by the plug-in. The
region in green represents the polar boss and liner which
n were imported from an ACIS (.sat) file, then meshed in
R0 R − R0 Abaqus/CAE. The layer of elements in red represents the
θ ( R ) = sin −1 ±δ
R Rtl − R 0 rubber shear ply doily which was generated by the plug-
in, and the cloth doily layers are shown in cyan.
Here, R is the radial distance from the center line to a
point in the layer, Ro is the radial distance from the cen-
terline to the turnaround point, and Rtl is the radius at the
dome-cylinder tangent line. A geodesic winding pattern is
obtained by choosing δ = 0.
The tank in this example is constructed of T700 graphite/
epoxy composite layers using a filament band width of 2.0
inches and a thickness of 0.025 inches. Interspersed be-
tween the helical layers are high-angle (hoop) layers
which terminate just past the dome-cylinder transition
point. Finally, a rubber shear-ply and cloth reinforcement
layers are also specified for the region near the polar
boss.
The helical layers in a pressure vessel are typically
wound in such a manner as to produce an axisymmetric
lay-up. In other words, for every helical band oriented at
+θ, there is a corresponding band at –θ to cause the
overall laminate to have a balanced angle-ply (+/-θ) lay- Figure 3: Polar boss region mesh
up. This assumption is implicit in an axisymmetric model.
Therefore only a single orientation angle, defined with The mesh near the dome, tangent to the cylinder, is
respect to the cylinder tangent line needs to be specified shown in Figure 4. The regions in blue represent the fila-
for each layer; the plug-in will calculate the angle-ply lami- ment wound layers with wind angles of 7.0, 8.0, and 9.0
nate material properties for each element within each heli- degrees. The red regions represent the interspersed
cal layer. hoop layers which wrap around the cylindrical portion of
the structure. The void regions, where helical layers
Mesh and Section Creation
bridge across ends of hoop layers or doilies, are meshed
The finite element mesh is created automatically by the and assigned resin material properties; these are shown
plug-in. The user may choose the number of mesh seeds in yellow.
through the thickness of the layers and whether to con-
strain the number of seeds to increase, decrease, or re-
main constant. A target element aspect ratio may also be
entered. The option of choosing a pure quad mesh, quad
-dominated mesh, or a triangular mesh is provided. For
the present case, a pure quad mesh was chosen. The
number of elements through the thickness of the layers
was set to 2, but was permitted to be increased by the
meshing algorithm. The target aspect ratio was set to
2.0. In addition to these global mesh parameters, individ-
ual mesh seeds may be specified to override the global
parameters for each individual layer as desired by the
user.
When specifying the element section properties, the ele-
ment order (linear or quadratic) and the element controls
(full- or reduced- integration, hybrid or incompatible
modes formulation) can be selected. For this case, a line-
ar, reduced-integration element type was chosen. Again,
these global settings may be overridden for each layer.
Figure 4: Cylindrical region mesh
The resulting mesh near the polar boss region is shown in
4
Loading
An alternative method of viewing the wind angle results is
The analysis is carried out in two steps. First, an ultimate to plot the wind angle for each layer as a function of dis-
pressure load (1.5 x Nominal) of 2250 psi is applied to the tance along the dome. A special custom output dialog
liner surface. The aluminum liner experiences yielding in box is included in the plug-in for this purpose. It facilitates
this step. The pressure is returned back to zero in the the generation of the paths that Abaqus/Viewer requires
second analysis step. The residual stresses and strains to generate X-Y path plots. The resulting wind angle plot
are captured by the analysis. is shown in Figure 6, again showing the rapid transition at
Output the turnaround radius.
While creating the model in the plug-in, the user is given Stresses and strains between the composite layers are of
the option of requesting output generated from the UVARM interest because of potential delamination and other inter-
user subroutine. Subroutine UVARM is used for creating laminar failures. The custom path plot utility is again used
user-defined output variables at the material integration to plot fiber strain along the interface between layers.
points. By default the plug-in automatically creates three Figure 7 displays fiber strain along the innermost nodes of
output variables; the wind angle (UVARM1), the strain the six layers. The fiber strains are read from user output
along the fiber direction (UVARM2), and the strain trans- variable UVARM2.
verse to the fiber direction (UVARM3). By modifying the
UVARM subroutine, more user-defined output variables
can be created. Because the logarithmic strain is availa-
ble in the pressure vessel coordinate reference frame and
the wind angle is known at each point along the dome,
these strains can be transformed into the fiber direction.
For this analysis, the default UVARM output generated by
the plug-in was used.
Results
Processing the results from the wound composite applica-
tion begins with the examination of the wind angle
throughout the layout to verify that the model was gener-
ated properly. A contour plot of the wind angle is shown
in Figure 5. The plot shows the expected wind angle lay-
out; specifically, that the angle of each layer sharply ap-
proaches ninety degrees as the layer approaches the
turnaround point. Additionally, the outermost hoop layer
on the cylindrical section clearly shows a wind angle near
ninety degrees. Figure 6: Path plot of wind angles
Figure 5: Contour of wind angles (UVARM1) Figure 7: Fiber Strains - Step1 (2250 psi)
5
Figure 8 shows the fiber strain path plot after unloading
(step 2) has occurred. As can be seen, the residual
strains are mostly tensile, with some compressive residu-
al strain in the innermost helical layer.
Figure 10: Liner equivalent plastic strain after unloading
Conclusions
Figure 8: Fiber Strains – Step 2 (0 psi)
The customization capabilities within Abaqus/CAE and
the solver capabilities within Abaqus/Standard combine to
provide the flexibility needed to create custom applica-
Figure 9 shows the fiber strain in the first helical layer at tions that can fully automate the analyses of filament
the ultimate pressure load (red) and the residual strain wound composite pressure vessels. The full integration
after unloading (green). between the GUI, the model, and the output database
provides a solid foundation for the development of all cus-
tom applications.
Figure 10 shows the equivalent plastic strain (PEEQ) in
the aluminum liner after the pressure has been relieved.
This permanent plasticity in the liner produces favorable
prestress between the liner and the composite overwrap,
to help keep the liner from debonding during cryogenic
cooling in subsequent loadings as in the case of liquid
oxygen storage or other cryogenic applications.
Figure 9: Fiber strain in first helical layer at ultimate
pressure and after unloading
6
References
1. Peters, S.T., Humphrey, W.D, and Foral, R.F., Filament Winding Composite Structure Fabrication, 2nd ed.
2. Gray, D.L., and Moser, D.J., “Finite Element Analysis of a Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel”, American In-
stitute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Abaqus References
For additional information on the Abaqus capabilities referred to in this brief please see the following Abaqus 6.13 docu-
mentation references:
• Abaqus GUI Toolkit User’s and Reference Guides
• CAE User’s Guide
− “The Plug-in toolset,” Section 81
− “Importing and exporting geometry data and models,” Section 10
• Abaqus User Subroutine Reference Guide
− “UVARM” Section 1.1.55
• Analysis User’s Guide
− “Linear elastic behavior,” Section 22.2.1
About SIMULIA
SIMULIA is the Dassault Systèmes brand that delivers a scalable portfolio of Realistic Simulation solutions including the Abaqus prod-
uct suite for Unified Finite Element Analysis, multiphysics solutions for insight into challenging engineering problems, and lifecycle
management solutions for managing simulation data, processes, and intellectual property. By building on established technology, re-
spected quality, and superior customer service, SIMULIA makes realistic simulation an integral business practice that improves prod-
uct performance, reduces physical prototypes, and drives innovation. Headquartered in Providence, RI, USA, with R&D centers in
Providence and in Vélizy, France, SIMULIA provides sales, services, and support through a global network of over 30 regional offices
and distributors. For more information, visit www.simulia.com
The 3DS logo, SIMULIA, Abaqus, and the Abaqus logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Dassault Systèmes or its subsidiaries, which include ABAQUS, Inc. Other company, product, and
service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
Copyright © 2007 Dassault Systèmes
