Journal
POLYMER COMPOSITES
Volume 31, Issue 11, Pages 1881-1889Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/pc.20982
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Funding
- Office of Naval Research through Advanced Materials Intelligent Processing Center (University of Delaware) [N00014-06-1-1000]
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Advanced composites are manufactured by liquid composite molding by impregnating a thermoset resin into a stationary woven or stitched preform. For a successful injection, the manufactured part should fill all the empty spaces between the fiber tows and inside the fiber tows with the resin. The fiber tows in such preforms have orders of magnitude lower permeability than the regions between the fiber tows, which makes them difficult to fill and hence susceptible to formation of microvoids. Numerical simulations can address the filling of fiber tows but it is difficult to capture the essential physics of their filling in a model created entirely from first principles due to the complexity of the flow which involves anisotropic permeability of flow along and across a fiber tow, uneven packing, fiber sizing, capillarity and the treatment of entrapped air. Hence, in this article we adopt a phenomenological approach in which we compare some of the possible models with an experimental procedure. The experimental procedure provides a quantitative measure of the filling of fiber tows during the impregnation process. A numerical simulation based on the dual scale flow was developed with different constitutive models that described the filling of the fiber tows. The predictions of the different models are compared with the experimental results under different processing conditions to select the model that most accurately describes the tow filling behavior. POLYM. COMPOS., 31:1881-1889, 2010. (C) 2010 Society of Plastics Engineers
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