Simulation of Liquid Composite Molding Based on Control-Volume Finite Element Method

Abstract

The control-volume finite element method (CVFEM) is a widely used numerical tool for modeling the polymer molding process because it is more user friendly and more robust than the conventional finite element or finite difference methods. This work compares the accuracy and stability of five upwind schemes of CVFEM for simulating the non-isothermal flow in the reactive liquid composite molding (LCM) processes. The results show that the mass weighted skew upwind (MAW) and the one-point upwind schemes are the most robust for simulating non-isothermal reactive flow in complicated flow domains and mesh shape. The streamline upwind control-volume (SUCV) scheme provides better numerical accuracy for simulating isothermal reactive flow. However, it tends to give unrealistic solutions at nodes close to the inlet region when simulating non-isothermal reactive flow in complicated geometry with obtuse triangular mesh. The two-point upwind scheme is inferior to MAW, the one-point upwind, and the SUCV schemes. The exponential and linear shape functions are not suitable for simulating the reactive LCM processes.