Shevtsov, S.; Zhilyaev, I.; Chang, S.-H.; Wu, J.-K.; Huang, J.-P.; Snezhina, N. Experimental and Numerical Study of Vacuum Resin Infusion for Thin-Walled Composite Parts. Appl. Sci.2020, 10, 1485.
Shevtsov, S.; Zhilyaev, I.; Chang, S.-H.; Wu, J.-K.; Huang, J.-P.; Snezhina, N. Experimental and Numerical Study of Vacuum Resin Infusion for Thin-Walled Composite Parts. Appl. Sci. 2020, 10, 1485.
Abstract
This paper considers a new approach to the modeling of the vacuum infusion process at the manufacturing three-dimensional composite parts of complex shape. The developed approach and numerical methods are focused on the reliable prediction with the needed accuracy and elimination the unrecoverable defect of composite structure such as the dry spots. The paper presents some experimental results, which demonstrate two cases of dry spots formation in large aircraft composite panels, and analyses the reasons of these defects arising. Our numerical technique is based on the vacuum infusion of the liquid resin into porous preform as the two phase flow, which is described by the phase field equation coupled with the Richards equation describing the fluid motion in unsaturated soils with spatially varied pressure dependant porosity and saturation. This problem statement allowed to correctly reconstruct the resin front motion and formation of inner and outer dry spots depending on its movement. For the rapid detection of preform zones that are suspicious for defect formation two indicators calculated during process simulation are proposed and tested at the numerical experiments. The auxiliary program tool has been developed in MATLAB environment to correctly detect the times of formation, localization and dimensions of the arising dry spots by using the results of the finite element model simulation.
Keywords
polymeric composites; composite technology; vacuum infusion; process modeling and optimization
Subject
Chemistry and Materials Science, Polymers and Plastics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
