Vernay designs rubber parts which interact with fluids. Although designing rubber parts has for many years been considered an art, we believe it is indeed a science. Any time a new design is needed we want to do a simulation before we cut steel. It is routine enough for us that we often use it as well for existing designs when there are questions about the best way to apply a part in a different situation.
The tools we have available are:
- Solid Edge CAD to quickly develop parametric part models
- Abaqus non-linear structural analysis (FEA, both static and dynamic)
- Proprietary software which quickly simulates common part families
- CFDesign computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
- tools for coupling FEA with CFD
- Sigma 3D mold flow analysis (currently in evaluation)
We have been using FEA to model rubber parts for 15 years and find that with adequate material models we can predict part function very well. Since we formulate many of our own materials we have equipment in our lab to routinely measure the stress-strain of our materials and we have proprietary software to extract the needed data quickly from our large on-line library of test data.
We can do most analyses in a matter of a few hours. More detailed design studies may require several days. We have proprietary software to automate such studies by coupling Abaqus with the MiniTAB design of experiments (DOE) tool. The typical output for our customers is in the form of spreadsheets, animations, and recommendations.
For those designs which conform to our common part families, we have already run extensive analysis and validation and captured these results in proprietary software. This enables us to quickly obtain new designs by interpolation without the need to do a full FEA simulation.
For those applications where there are issues such as undesired flow circulations, cavitation and noise, precise pressure loss, and the degree of turbulence, we can use CFD alongside FEA for a more complete model. In some cases it is desirable to couple the two solvers to provide a complete interactive solution.
We are also actively evaluating a full 3D physics modeling of rubber molding which includes green rubber flow properties, cross-linking, and simultaneous thermal analysis of the heaters, mold, cavities, and rubber to optimize the molding process.
The following are links to various AVI files. If you would like to view these examples of technical simulations, please click on the link: