Filament Wound Composite Pressure Vessel Analysis with Abaqus

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.