FIBERSIM PRODUCT SUITE ESTABLISHES POSITION AS WORLD-WIDE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY STANDARD

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FIBERSIM PRODUCT SUITE ESTABLISHES POSITION AS WORLD-WIDE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY STANDARD
31 March 2000 - VISTAGY

The past year was the one in which Composite Design Technologies' FiberSIM product suite established itself as the worldwide aerospace industry standard, according to CDT Vice President of Marketing & Sales, Ed Bernardon. As evidence, Bernardon pointed to the fact that FiberSIM is a proven product, with over 4 years of production use at dozens of customers making fighter planes, large and small commercial jets, helicopters and race cars.

CDT's track record has helped make FiberSIM the best selling software for design and manufacture of advanced composite parts, with sales currently running 3 to 4 times the previous year's pace.

Most of the leading companies in the aerospace industry are now using FiberSIM. Current production users include British Aerospace, Gamesa Aeronáutica, Saab Military Aircraft, Short Brothers plc, Boeing Company, Hawker de Havilland, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Sikorsky Aircraft, Raytheon Aircraft Company, Bell Helicopter Textron, and many others.

Aerospace companies are rapidly adopting FiberSIM because it provides producibility and performance feedback in the early stages of design, eliminating the need to rely on the time consuming and costly build-and-break approach. The result is a substantial reduction in the time and cost required to design and manufacture composite parts. Randy Martin, Design and Development, and Bill Forster, Manufacturing Engineering, for Sikorsky Aircraft, said that "FiberSIM assisted the S-92 Helibus Cockpit team in reducing the flow time required to move the complex Composite Canopy Structure from basic data to completion of production parts. The reduction was from 15 to 11 months, a significant 27% improvement. With FiberSIM, our first parts were virtually perfect and our partner, Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation, located 9000 miles away, was able to do it right the first time."

FiberSIM is not only transforming how companies engineer and manufacture composites, but it is also making a huge impact on the time and cost required. The dramatic benefits that customers are experiencing is due in large part to FiberSIM's full integration within the CAD systems used by the aerospace industry and its seamless links with downstream processes. CAD users easily learn to operate FiberSIM and quickly take advantage of this tool's unique capability to provide performance and producibility feedback in minutes from within the CAD environment. Once a design is complete, FiberSIM seamlessly integrates the transfer of 3D design data to downstream processes used by the majority of aerospace firms. Close cooperation with integration partners helps insure reliable integration and efficient day to day operation of 3D design data driven manufacturing processes. FiberSIM integration partners include: laser projection suppliers Assembly Guidance, General Scanning and Virtek Vision; automated cutter suppliers American GFM, Cutting Edge and Eastman Technology Systems; nesting software suppliers Magestic Systems and Optimation.

The recent surge of growth has been fueled by the strong increase in demand for the existing flat pattern and laser projection programming tools as well as by last year's introduction of the Composite Engineering Environment. Product introductions and upgrades in the past year have served to complete the FiberSIM suite of integrated tools which provides a total solution from preliminary design through manufacturing. As evidence of this, Tony Williams, Development Engineering at British Aerospace, stated, "After extensive evaluation, FiberSIM was chosen as the design tool of composite components for the next generation of aircraft. With the increased complexity of designs and integration of design data to manufacturing, FiberSIM is seen as the tool to take concurrent engineering to the next level. The FiberSIM product reduces design time and increases manufacturing efficiency."

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About: VISTAGY
VISTAGY, Inc., is a leading developer of engineering software that enhances commercial 3D CAD systems. VISTAGY’s specialized engineering environments enable engineers to capture and communicate complete digital product definitions within CAD, thereby increasing productivity, improving the communication of product information throughout the product’s lifecycle, and allowing better-informed decision making early in design. VISTAGY software is used throughout the world in the aerospace, automotive, marine, medical, sporting goods, and transportation interiors industries. The company also offers training and consulting services.

FiberSIM is a suite of software that turns major CAD systems into advanced tools for designing and manufacturing composite parts. The software enables engineers to create a complete digital product definition of a composite part within their 3D modeling environment. FiberSIM supports flexible design methodologies for a wide variety of materials and manufacturing processes and automatically generates design details all the way from complex ply and zone drop-offs to variable offset surfaces for mock-up and tooling. The software simulates how composite material deforms over complex curvature and generates manufacturing information including documentation, flat patterns, and data to drive downstream manufacturing equipment. FiberSIM also uses XML technology to share composites data with people and applications throughout the enterprise.

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