Computational modeling of resin infusion process applied to small vessel hulls

Abstract

Polymeric composite materials are largely used for small vessels hull fabrication. They have many desired advantages like low weight, good mechanical performance and good resistance to marine environments. Resin infusion is one of the most common manufacture processes used for this kind of application. In this process, injection tubes are positioned above reinforced media inside mold cavity and resin is forced to flow, first, through these tubes. Tube correct positioning is crucial for a fast and free of imperfections (air bubbles or other filling problems) hull fabrication; however, usually, it is not easy to determine best location for them. In this work, a numerical modeling of the resin injection into a small hull vessel was performed using OpenFOAM software. Besides main solver, other three applications were used in current work. Blender was used to build the tree-dimensional hull geometry, Gmsh used to discretize the geometry, creating a regular mesh formed with hexahedra elements and ParaView used in results post-processing. Finite volume formulation combined with the volume of fluid method was used to solve the multi-phase (air + resin) fluid flow. Four sequential simulations were necessary to determine optimized injection procedure. Each simulation represents an enhancement to the previous one correcting problems like void formation. At the end, some theoretical recommendations are proposed and discussed for an optimized injection procedure for small vessels fabrication.