Celanese Partners with SIMULIA to Tackle Complex Customer Requests

Challenge

Consistently improve support for ever-developing customer requirements in the materials sector, including coupled simulations, complex material testing and characterization, detailed material cards and thorough validation reports.

Solution

Leverage the multi-physics simulation capabilities of SIMULIA Abaqus simulation capabilities to provide in-depth materials cards and help customers improve simulation accuracy to resolve complex material performance issues. A supportive partnership with the SIMULIA team consistently helps to develop knowledge.

Results

• Capability to model and run simulations on complex, hyper-elastic and composite materials
• Ability to deep-dive into simulation results and identify the exact cause, origin and propagation path of failures
• Increased confidence in tackling complex new areas and customer needs

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When you provide the materials that build our world, every usage scenario tells a different story. As a specialist materials company, uncovering those stories is essential. Its customers – across industries including automotive, aerospace, electronics, industrial, medical and consumer – increasingly want to reduce physical testing by using virtual validation to predict the performance of their products. A team based at the company’s Texas laboratory is responsible for supporting both internal and external customers through design, generating complex data, material modeling, simulation and validation through component testing.

“We are a solutions provider,” said Jameson Fee, Global CAE and Advanced Testing Leader at Celanese. “We provide a full set of information and resources to help our customers be successful in their applications. For example, in a metal-to-plastic conversion, we can help in the process of application development, or we can provide the material data if they want to run their own simulation. We can also work with our advanced testing group to do application-specific testing.”

Fee’s team provides a range of services to internal and external customers, typically focused in three different areas: technical consulting, such as how to model a particular material or situation; providing training on how to interpret simulation results; and supporting method development for simulations.

“This third area is where our team is doing the testing for application development,” Fee said. “If it’s a customer problem, one of the first things we want to understand is what is causing that problem – is it an issue with the material or something to do with an unforeseen load case they didn’t plan on? Is it the material data or how it was processed that is the issue? If the processing looks good and we’re getting consistent part performance, we know it’s something else, and we’ll look at the data on the simulations the customer was running.”

One of the biggest challenges for customers is that a material in use might not behave as it did in the laboratory. This is where simulation has a huge impact.

“In a lot of cases, you’ve got multiple components all made of different types of materials,” Fee explained. “In an automotive crash, for instance, during the event, you see what you see, but you don’t see everything that’s happening behind the scenes. That’s where simulation plays a big part because you can go millisecond by millisecond through an event to understand where the first point of failure is and what is causing that issue. How does that initial failure then propagate into a catastrophic failure? That’s where I think one of the big powers of simulation is.”

Fee’s team began its simulation journey using SIMULIA’s Abaqus Unified finite element analysis solutions for structural simulations on specific product lines. Since then, they haven’t looked back.

“One of the original product lines we used Abaqus for is our hyper-elastic type materials,” Fee explained. “We feel the Abaqus material models and capabilities to solve those sorts of events with those types of materials really outperform any other software out there. The other type of material would be our composites line – a unique product that requires a unique level of ability within the software to accurately model and run the simulations.”

In addition to the toolsets themselves, the support of the SIMULIA team has helped to increase the team’s confidence, especially when tackling complex new areas.

“SIMULIA is a software partner of ours, not just a software vendor,” Fee said. “We don’t necessarily understand which buttons to use in every situation because we’re not focused on a specific area. Having a partner to be able to lean on, to help us learn, has been really key in our development. That’s why we keep coming back. That ability to work together to provide solutions to our customers- that’s fabulous.”

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