A Coupled Flow and Residual Stress Model for Predicting Performance Variations of Composites Manufactured via Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding

摘要

In this paper, an integrated composite process simulation tool is developed to predict the defects and variations in parts fabricated via the low-cost, Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM) technique. The key is to couple the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based resin infusion simulation with the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) based curing and residual stress prediction. The CFD simulation, executed using the commercial software STAR-CCM+, is employed to predict the resin flow front movement and capture possible resin-starved areas. The fabric deformation and curing-induced residual stresses are modeled using the commercial FEA package ABAQUS. The integration of the CFD and FEA codes are achieved by linking the STAR-CCM+ and ABAQUS codes through customized dynamic libraraies. Both two-way coupled flow-compaction and one-way coupled infusion-cure simulations can be realized through our high-fidelity integrated toolkit. The proposed integrated composite process models are further applied to simulate the resin flow front and thickness variations of composite parts fabricated via VARTM to demonstrate its feasibility and predictive capability.