Abstract
The bladder molding process is primarily used in sporting applications but mostly with prepregs. Bladder-Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (B-RTM) presents the tremendous potential to automate and mass produce the complex hollow-composite profiles. Thin-ply, non-crimp fabrics (NCFs) provide excellent mechanical, fracture toughness, and vibration damping properties on top of the weight saving it offers to a final product. However, these fiber architectures are difficult to inject due to the resistance they provide for the polymer flow using the liquid injection process. Therefore, it is mandatory to optimize the process parameters to reduce the time for injection and simultaneously achieve better consolidation. This work presents a first, detailed, experimental case study to successfully inject a low-permeability, thin-ply, complex, thermoplastic tubular structure, and the effect of process parameters, boundary conditions, the associated manufacturing challenges, and proposed solutions are deliberated in this paper.
Highlights
The utilization of a resin transfer molding (RTM) manufacturing technique is becoming more popular in composites’ manufacturing industries [1,2,3,4]
In a RTM manufacturing technique, the polymer matrix is infused into the dry fiber preform at a certain pressure into the closed mold to impregnate the fabrics, in contrast to the traditional prepreg processing manufacturing technique [5]
Bladder-assisted resin transfer molding (B-RTM) is a manufacturing process variant suited for the fabrication of hollow-composite, complex-shaped parts such as a hollow tube [4]
Summary
The utilization of a resin transfer molding (RTM) manufacturing technique is becoming more popular in composites’ manufacturing industries [1,2,3,4]. Bladder-assisted resin transfer molding (B-RTM) is a manufacturing process variant suited for the fabrication of hollow-composite, complex-shaped parts such as a hollow tube [4]. The widely used manufacturing process for the hollow-composite profile is filament winding where the rovings are wound around the rotating mandrel to produce parts like drive shafts, tubes, and pressure vessels [6,7]. This process is associated with surface finishing issues, as there is no defined geometry, as well as the constraint on the fiber angle to be placed on the mandrel. The manufactured tubes were reproducible in terms of final thickness (1.5 ± 0.05 mm) and the fiber volume fractions (e.g., 54 ± 0.8%) for a particular experiment repeated with the same boundary conditions
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