Non-isothermal injection molding with resin cure and preform deformability

In this paper, a non-isothermal model to simulate some injection molding pr ocesses used to fabricate composite materials is deduced. The model allows the solid constituent in both the dry and the wet region to deform during i nfiltration. The dry porous material is assumed to behave elastically, whil e the mixture of resin and preform is assumed to behave as a standard linea r solid. The model also takes into account the fact that the liquid undergo es an exothermic cross-linking reaction during infiltration and eventually gels stopping the infiltration process. Focusing then on one-dimensional pr oblems it is shown that the integration of the mechanical problem in the un infiltrated region can be reduced to the integration of an ordinary differe ntial equation defining either the space-independent volume ratio or the lo cation of the infiltration front, depending on whether the flow is driven b y a given infiltration velocity or by a given inlet pressure. The remaining system of partial differential equations in the two interfaced and time-de pendent domains is then posed with the proper interface and boundary condit ions. After writing the problem in a Lagrangian formulation fixed on the so lid constituent, domain decomposition techniques are used for the simulatio n. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.