AutoFiber

Strain energy minimization of geodesic based parameterizations over 3D surfaces for optimization of fiber layup orientations. Created to be part of the De-La-Mo automatic defect insertion into FEM package developed at Iowa State University.

AutoFiber is Copyright (C) 2016-2018 Iowa State University Research Foundation, Inc. It is published under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Project Structure

This is repository is located on Github.

• autofiber/: Contains the python package autofiber.
• demos/: Contains a variety of demo models and a script, test.py which demonstrates usage on each model.
• docs/: Contains various documentation materials. Complete documentation can be obtained here.

Package Structure

• generator.py: Main control script which generates geodesic start points, calculates geodesic paths, computes the geodesic parameterization, and employs the strain energy minimization.
• geodesic.py: Contains the functions necessary for computing the geodesic trajectories and parameterizations.
• optimization.py: Contains the definition for the strain energy function and gradient as well as the RMSprop algorithm used to minimize the strain energy function.
• analyze_uv.py: Spatialnde helper script that defines mesh adjacency indexes.

Dependencies

• Tested with Python 2.7-3.7
• spatialnde: 3D model loader and image projection package
  Created by Dr. Stephen D. Holland at Iowa State University
  Spatialnde
• Numpy
• Matplotlib - optional for plotting

Installation

Once all dependencies are installed run:

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

To include as a dependency in your project consider using git's subtree capabilities. The De-La-Mo project showcases this ability and can be seen in the relevant repository. In order to install AutoFiber alongside your project add the following to your projects setup.py:

package_dir={
    'autofiber': 'autofiber/autofiber'
},
packages=["autofiber"],

This will then allow you to import the AutoFiber class in your project as such:

from autofiber.generator import AutoFiber

How to run

Take a look at test.py for an in-depth explanation of the relevant API calls and how they work for a variety of models.

Tutorial

A short tutorial with explanations of API and images of results is located here.

Abaqus integration

A function has been created and implemented in De-La-Mo to allow for automatic insertion of computed fiber orientations into Abaqus. See the De-La-Mo project for more information.