Process Modelling of Curing Process-Induced Internal Stress and Deformation of Composite Laminate Structure with Elastic and Viscoelastic Models

Abstract

In this paper, two kinds of transient models, the viscoelastic model and the linear elastic model, are established to analyze the curing deformation of the thermosetting resin composites, and are calculated by COMSOL Multiphysics software. The two models consider the complicated coupling between physical and chemical changes during curing process of the composites and the time-variant characteristic of material performance parameters. Subsequently, the two proposed models are implemented respectively in a three-dimensional composite laminate structure, and a simple and convenient method of local coordinate system is used to calculate the development of residual stresses, curing shrinkage and curing deformation for the composite laminate. Researches show that the temperature, degree of curing (DOC) and residual stresses during curing process are consistent with the study in literature, so the curing shrinkage and curing deformation obtained on these basis have a certain referential value. Compared the differences between the two numerical results, it indicates that the residual stress and deformation calculated by the viscoelastic model are more close to the reference value than the linear elastic model.