Designing and modeling for composites - Fusion 360 Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this chapter, modeling a first draft I'm going to walk you through how to use tools within fusion 360 and general modeling tools and how to use those tools to help you design a better composite part and an easier workflow. Now, this is not going to be a step-by-step guide in how to model in fusion 360. If you're interested in that, I did do a course previously called, Fusion 360 Modeling Techniques and Workflow. And in that course, I walk you through the whole process on how to design using different techniques and tools and it's all step-by-step guide. So if you're interested check that course out otherwise we're going to continue along here. And some of the things we need to think about when designing for composites is kind of some of our targets, what are we trying to achieve? So, obviously this is a kids push bike so we're trying to make a push bike but we're also thinking about how we're going to make it and how many we're going to make. So these are kind of considerations that we need to play into. Now, one of the key aspects on this particular bike is that, we are going to have a very low production volume. We're only talking about making a handful of these bikes. So we want to be very careful on how we design the part so that we don't have a very large tooling cost and associated in how many tools are we making, how complicated is the tool, also, how many steps are there? Because each step has its own tools associated with it and its own labor associated to it. So we want to be very mindful of how we do that. So there's a couple aspects in this particular frame that we wanted to take into consideration. One, you can see in the shape of the frame, that it's a very smooth flowing frame. So you can see here that we have very smooth transitions between all of the sections. Now, one of the reasons this is really important is, we said previously that we were going to use a pre prag carbon fiber system to make this part. So we're going to be using a bi-directional braided sleeve, we're going to be using a plain weave cloth and a uni-directional carbon fiber and all of those system vision, the same matrix but we're not going to be using compression molded style parts and inserts. So some of these very high load areas that have complex fitting so like back near where the axles are going to be fitted in or up by the bearing races. We're not going to design any of that to be done in a compression molded style part. So we want to make sure that we have very smooth and continuous flows so that we can use that one single process. Now, that's really important to reduce costs because anytime you go into compression molding, you're going to inherently increase your pressure on your part, which is going to mean that you have to have more expensive and harder tooling materials. So, we're trying to be careful with that. So because of the material that we're selecting, we're making sure that we have a very continuous flowing part. Now, another thing we're going to think about is and you can probably see that there's only one chainstay. Now this is a single sided chainstay system and the reason we're doing this is one, it looks really cool. It's a cool design key, but we're also doing it so that we can make this entire frame out of a single mold and a mold that's not incredibly complicated. So we're able to do that because we can actually build the mold on this side here. That basically is in contact with the entire frame. So we don't have to have multiple pieces which means we have less mold, which means there's less cost and less time spent on designing tuning. Now, another consideration that had to be made was the parting line. So we wanted a nice continuous party line. So if I go ahead and turn on draft analysis you can clearly see that there is a very straight mindfully designed parting line because I brought this straight down the down tube and into the seat tube and into the stays. So this was all done so that everything on the green could be done against the mold and the blue would be done against our vacuum system. So, this is the general layout of the part. And I'm showing you the finished part first, because I want you to kind of understand the different aspects of the design that were thought about very early on so that we could design for that in our workflow. So let's go ahead, we're going to get into the sketch of the frame.