A SIMPLIFIED FLOW MODEL FOR RESIN TRANSFER MOLDING OF POLYMER COMPOSITES

Resin transfer molding (RTM) is an important manufacturing process tha t holds great potential for low cost and fast processing of large and complicated polymer composite parts and structures. The RTM process in volves the impregnation of the reactive polymer resin into preplaced f ibrous reinforcements in a mold. Prediction of the flow front location s and filling pattern during the mold filling stage is helpful in iden tifying the potential problems in the very early stage of a mold desig n. A model can provide the information for a designer to optimize the process parameters, such as pressure, flow rate, gate locations, and t emperature, before the mold is actually built. However the existing fl ow models for RTM are quite complicated and require much computational time to accomplish a complete filling simulation, which makes the opt imization work very time consuming. In this study, a simplified flow m odel, which assumes equal pressure near the flow front, is developed t o greatly reduce the computational efforts in the flow simulation. Hea t transfer and chemical reaction are estimated using simplified Lagran ge equations.