Foam core deformation during liquid molding of sandwich structures: Modeling and experimental analysis

The rapid manufacturing of composite parts by liquid molding containing foam cores introduces potential processing issues that could lead to degradation in part quality and performance. This paper addresses the key issue of the flow-induced foam core deformation and its effect on the molding pressure. A set of molding experiments are carried out to investigate mechanisms linked to the foam core and fabric deformation during the filling stage. A simplified two-dimensional model is proposed to predict the pressure evolution resulting from the combined deformation of foam core and the fabrics. Computed results show reasonable agreement with the experimental results.