Recent Advances in Sharing Standardized Composite Structure Design and Manufacturing Information

Composite structures have been developed and used in the aerospace, automobile, sports, and marine industries since the early 1940s. Compared to conventional metallic structures, newer high-performance composite structures provide benefits such as decreased weight and reduced energy consumption. An international standards subcommittee on industrial automation systems and integration has developed and implemented a standard, ISO 10303-209, for sharing the manufacturing information for these complex composite structures. This standard is considered essential for improving the design, analysis, and manufacturing productivity of composite structures, and for enabling the long-term data retention necessary to support the composite structures throughout the lifetime of the products that use them. This paper describes recent advances that led to the development of ISO 10303-209 data models for composite structural shape and composition. The paper also reports the status of ongoing implementation efforts, including efforts to use this standard to support long-term data retention. The varied usage scenarios have motivated several areas for future improvement such as full three-dimensional representation and the efficient, cost-effective visualization of composite structural parts. Issues and their proposed solutions, along with their anticipated impacts on the design, analysis, manufacturing, and long-term support of composite structures are also discussed.