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B-Rep Stiffened Aircraft Panel
Direct Open CASCADE Technology curve imprinting into sheet B-Rep geometry with 49 eccentric T-beam stiffeners on conformal quad mesh edges.
Aerospace skin panels require longitudinal stringers and transverse frames to maintain aerodynamic contour under cabin pressure and suction. Rather than manually stitching discretized patches, this model utilizes Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) inside WebCAE to imprint 9 cutting lines directly onto a 3.0 × 1.5 m B-Rep face, partitioning it into 30 sub-faces and 71 topological edges. WebCAE meshes the subdivided B-Rep with conformal quads and assigns 49 eccentric T-beams to shared mesh edges, solving the full coupled system in native code.
1. Geometry & FEA Mesh
- •Sheet geometry: 3000 × 1500 mm flat aluminum sheet, thickness t = 4 mm (E = 70 GPa, ν = 0.33, ρ = 2700 kg/m³).
- •OCCT geometric imprinting: 4 longitudinal curves (y = 300, 600, 900, 1200 mm) and 5 transverse curves (x = 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500 mm) partitioning the B-Rep face into 30 faces and 71 edges.
- •Stiffening members: 49 eccentric T-beams assigned to internal edges via assign beam (flush=inner, stringers tee 40 × 25 × 2 × 3 mm, frames tee 80 × 30 × 2.5 × 3 mm).
- •Mesh: 8,460 quad shell elements, 8,551 nodes, and 51,306 degrees of freedom.
2. Loads & Boundary Conditions
- •Fixed support (fix edge number N) along all 22 perimeter boundary edges of the sheet.
- •Uniform lateral pressure p = 2,000 Pa (0.002 MPa) applied across all 30 surface faces.
- •Automatic kinematic node sharing ensuring complete displacement and rotation compatibility between shell quad vertices and beam elements.
3. Simulation Results & Findings
- ✓Maximum out-of-plane panel deflection drops from 61.2 mm (unstiffened bare sheet) to 0.628 mm with 49 T-beams — a 97-fold stiffness increase.
- ✓Peak von Mises stress in the aluminum skin reduces from 128.4 MPa down to 7.26 MPa due to effective load transfer into frame flanges.
- ✓Beam bending moments and axial forces resolve simultaneously with shell fiber stress distribution across each stiffened bay.
CAD/CAE engineers use WebCAE's direct OCCT B-Rep imprinting pipeline to convert complex aircraft panel sketches and stiffener layouts into validated FEA models without manual meshing cleanups. Exporting the calculated assembly into a compact .caeweb container lets suppliers and structural leads verify rivet/weld pitch and stress margins in minutes.
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