RWC offers material property data calculators for ecommerce products
Rock West has published theoretical material properties and launched several reference calculators for estimating the performance of rods and tubes offered on its website.
RWC tube property calculator for beams. Source | Rock West Composites (RWC)
Rock West Composites (RWC, San Diego, Calif., U.S.) announces the publishing of engineering properties for most products and the launch of several calculators on its website for tubes and rods. This information will help engineers estimate deflection, failure mode and failure loads in a variety of common load cases for several product types offered. By publishing theoretical properties alongside a tool that can give a sense of behavior in a variety of load cases, RWC enables customers to find the best off-the-shelf solution for their needs.
On individual product pages, customers will find a section called “Engineering Properties” that will include Young’s modulus, shear modulus, tensile strength, compressive strength, shear strength, coefficients of thermal expansion, Poisson’s ratios, fiber layup, fiber type, resin type and more. Laminate properties and mechanical calculations are based on Classical Lamination Theory and are provided for reference only.
The calculators on pages for most tubes and rods allow calculations for the estimated performance of cantilevers, beams, axial loads, and critical speed and torque. These tools allow for several fields of input and return theoretical results for properties such as maximum shear stress and bending stress, deflection at load point, maximum deflection and location, change in length, twist angle and maximum allowable torque.
According to the company, these properties and calculators give engineers everything that they need to design with RWC’s off-the-shelf products. While the information provided is only theoretical, RWC does offer formal testing services if customers elect to advance to that level of support. Eventually, RWC plans to expand its calculators to plates, panels, shaped tubes and other products.
“Customer often reach out to find out how much weight a tube can hold, what amount of deflection they can expect, or to find out what the material properties are for a specific part so that they can run their own simulations,” explains Josh Lyon, ecommerce product technical lead. “We are excited to provide this information online on the product pages themselves, alongside tools that enable them to quickly run calculations for common use cases.”