We have mastercam solid works and Catia. Is this enough for a product strength and analysis? I have a few buddies that are really good with these programs. I… Not so much.
I have a friend who I constantly hand paper prints and he puts it in the computer. Also have a stress engineer.
This is a rudder root for a small pleasure craft.
I know CATIA v5 has a finite element modeler built in. You could use that, although if your layup is complex it might be hard to create an accurate model
MasterCAM is not a modleing program, so I highly doubt you’ll be able to do any structural anaylsis with it. Solidworks proffesional comes with a “light” version of COSMOS, which can do simple shapes and loading, but is not powerful enough to handle composits. You can get the full version of COSMOS, but even then, I have yet to find a way to do non-isotropic materials.
Can’t comment on Catia as my exposure to it is limited. 
Well we have the best Catia from what I’m told today but the problem really boils down to not having a stress engineer that likes drinking beer as much as the rest of us do…might actually be a good idea to have stress independently done and looked at. There’s also a destructive inspection company that specializes on destroying things that aren’t supposed to be broken. Hopefully they like beer!
Well if you have all of Catia then go with that if you can. You can sign up here for the Dassault Systems 2011 Composite e-Seminar series. http://plmv5.com/composites2011/?ref=combn3dscpw120x60x050111 And then here is a quick over view of Catia’s composite capability.
[ame=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD63H47aQVE&feature=channel_video_title”]DS PLM Composites Solutions for AEROSPACE Industry Aircraft Wing Panel - YouTube[/ame]
Don’t you just wish your shop had laser guided ply layup. 
And to bad not all of us have a ply cutter table. 
Whow … Way over my head!!!
Hi all,
Not every software that manage composite will do the work that you need, then be careful in distinguishing between sw (software) for designing, sw for manufacturing, sw for stress analysis.
Catia has a lot of tools and covers all aspects above related to composite, but their ability to solve your problem depends by the nature of your problem, of course.
For stress analysis the main issue is the draping of plies and the way your sw will manage them. For this task there exist specific tools usually not comprised in the sw package because they are targeted to those people involved with (very ) complicate geometries. And catia makes no exception, unless you have some adds-on like Composite Modeler for Catia, for example ( and the same holds for Cosmos). But if your component is relatively simple from geometric viewpoint and draping is simple, you can use the capabilities of the basic fem package of catia where you will use orthotropic properties for you materials and will create as many user coordinate systems for defining plies orientation as you need, in the same way as happens in a composite dept.
Be carefull in choosing correct material properties that you input, remember that in curved surfaces your draping will be different from what really happens since distorsion of materials ( mainly weft and warp of fabrics) are mathematically adjusted, decide what you expect as output from your calculation ( usually you should obtain results comparable with test otherwise fem analysis has little or no meaning).
Please describe your future construction more detailed.
SW (solidworks) is general MCAD wit optional FEA (Simulation), CFD (flow), CAM (CAMWorks) modules, etc. MasterCAM is a CAM software 
For CATIA you can purchase optional modules for composites (CPE, CPM, GSD,…).
You may buy specialized software, like FiberSIM from Vistagy:
http://www.vistagy.com/products/fibersim-composite-environments.aspx
They have modules for: CATIA V4, CATIA V5, NX, and Creo Parametric/ Pro/engineer
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or
Hypersizer
Both are impressive, but little expensive as well.
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