FIBER CLUSTERING: ITS QUANTIFICATION AND INFLUENCE ON THE PERMEABILITY OF UNIDIRECTIONAL FIBROUS MEDIA

摘要

A good understanding of the microscopic details of flow through fiber preforms remains arncritical step in the design and optimization of composite liquid molding processes such as resinrntransfer molding (RTM) and its variants. However, the measurement of the key relevantrnproperty, namely the permeability of the preform, is still not standardized and remains difficult tornperform as well as to interpret. In this paper, numerical results are presented for boundaryrnelement simulations of creeping flow through models of non-woven fabrics that are made up ofrnparallel fiber bundles. Starting from ordered arrays of fiber tows, several types of microstructuralrnvariations are introduced, and their effect on permeability examined.