An Optimized Control Volume/Finite Element Method (CV/FEM) for Non-Isothermal Liquid Composite Molding (LCM) Process

Abstract

The numerical simulation of a mass and heat transfer model for the curing stage of the resin transfer molding (RTM) process is known as a useful method to analyze the process before the mold is actually built. The optimization of non-isothermal mold filling simulation time without losing the efficiency remains an important challenge in the RTM process. These were some reasons that motivate our work, in which we are interested in the amelioration of the performance of the RTM simulation code in terms of execution time and memory space occupation. A modified control volume/finite element method (CV/FEM) is developed to solve the resin flow problem. Full advantage is taken of some of the intrinsic characteristics of this method, in particular, its capability of eliminating the need to re-mesh continuously the resin-filled domain at each time step. Our developed model leads to the numerical prediction of temperature, pressure distribution, and flow front position with great accuracy, together with a precise representation of the thermal (spatiotemporal) behavior of the resin inside the mold. Furthermore, we have improved new methods to optimize the cycle time, since despite the intense interest in the modeling and simulation of RTM process, minimization of mold filling time without losing the part quality remains an important issue in the resin transfer molding process. Thereby, the effects of several parameters on the filling process are deeply investigated. Moreover, we tried to identify the thermal conductivity of a composite material by inverse analysis of the heat conduction phenomenon in resin transfer molding process. The Gauss–Newton–Levenberg–Marquardt method was privileged. The validity of our approaches is evaluated with analytical and experimental results where an excellent agreement was found.