Abstract
To increase the use of fiber reinforced lightweight structural components in the automotive industry, their manufacturing processes have to obtain demanding economic requirements. One possibility is to use Compression Resin Transfer Molding (CRTM), which is fast and can be highly automated. One disadvantage can be the very high cavity pressure during injection. To avoid this disadvantage, a pressure-controlled RTM (PC-RTM) process was developed. PC-RTM uses a variable mold gap height and an embedded pressure sensor to control the cavity pressure actively during mold filling. In this work, we investigate this process by experiments and simulations with varying initial mold gap and controlled cavity pressure. We show that PC-RTM is a viable manufacturing process with short cycle times and high robustness. Furthermore, the simulations are validated by comparison to the experiments and show the same process characteristics.
Highlights
Continuous fiber reinforced plastics have a huge potential to realize lightweight constructions in the automotive industry
In Compression Resin Transfer Molding (CRTM), a mold gap increases the preform permeability and during the injection step the cavity pressure is much lower than in conventional High-Pressure Resin Transfer Molding (HP-RTM)
The cavity pressures are shown as blue colored lines and the mold gap heights are shown in green color
Summary
Continuous fiber reinforced plastics have a huge potential to realize lightweight constructions in the automotive industry. To increase their market share, more economic manufacturing processes have to be developed and especially aspects like short cycle time, Institute of Vehicle System Technology (FAST), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), ß 2020 The Author(s). A subsequent compression step is needed to achieve the final part thickness, where very high cavity pressures are reached
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