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To better support customers’ product design and development through CAE technical services, Asahi Kasei Engineering (AEC, Fowlerville, Mich., U.S.), a subsidiary of Asahi Kasei, has launched a cloud-based CAE solution platform, offering precise apps to predict crash and impact behavior of polymers and fiber-reinforced polymers (FRPs).

As the adoption of polymer materials increases, precise simulation of material behavior contributes to enhanced product design and reduced costs and time for material and application development. With increasing use of cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC), on-demand computer aided engineering (CAE) software installed in cloud HPC as software-as-a-service (SaaS) is becoming more common in the material development process.

AEC’s apps offered through its CAE platform include the downloadable and highly accurate polymer material fracture prediction model, i-Lupe. Microscopically, amorphous polymer materials have a structure in which molecular chains are intricately entangled. When an impact or other force is applied to this material — causing significant deformation — the molecular chains are stretched, resulting in the formation of voids and fibrils (bundles of molecular chains). When these so-called “crazes” grow, the polymer material fractures. By focusing on these crazes, i-Lupe can accurately predict and reproduce possible resulting fractures in the polymer.

As a supporting app to i-Lupe, the CAE platform offers an on-demand mapping tool, specifically focused on anisotropic materials such as FRPs. This tool converts fiber orientation data into i-Lupe material property lists, which are used as reference for selecting the optimal material for specific applications, enabling an accurate visual representation of deformation behavior of FRPs.