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FEA Analysis.

Whilst the basic idea of carbon fibre enfolding the load-bearing parts means that the majority of the stresses are taken by the carbon fibre, the design weak point is at the join of the folding hinge. Accordingly static structural analysis was done with representative loads to see where the areas of maximum stress were, then the geometry of the frames was adjusted to minimise these stresses. The screen shots below are of the results after the geometry had been adjusted. Picture 1 is of the Ansys model used, Picture 2 The 3D stresses on a single layer of the carbon fibre twill, and pictures 3 & 4 the Von Mises stresses around the folding hinge. To give an indication of the computational load the von Mises took 9854 seconds at 4500 Mflops (over 90% load on all four processors), but not being an FEA engineer I made no attempt to simplify the meshes to speed things up.