In this work, an operator splitting numerical technique is used to solve for the temperature distribution in three dimensions during non-isothermal filling of anisotropic porous media in processes such as resin transfer molding (RTM). In these processes, the parts are manufactured by injecting resin into thin cavities so the flow is primarily in the plane of the part and is modeled as two dimensional flow. However, due to importance of conduction in the out of plane direction, the energy equation needs to be solved in 3-D. Scaling of the terms in the energy balance equation allows us to determine their significance. Important terms considered for this study in such processes are advection, conduction, and heat of curing reation. The operator splitting scheme used to obtain the 3-D temperature solution takes advantage of the fact that advection is only important in the plane and conduction is only important in the thickness direction. When combined with a predictor-corrector method, this scheme converges rapidly to a stable temperature solution for the moving boundary problem. Because of its superior stability, this method uses large time steps to accelerate the calculation while maintaining good accuracy.
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