NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF RESIN FLOW IN RTMPROCESSING FOR TWO STEP 3D BRAID SHELL PREFORM WITH VARYINGSECTION

The filling process of RTM for the two step 3D braid shell preform with a varying section was investigated theoretically by employing a calculating method of divide-integration. Several formulations related to the resinvelocity, resin filling time and resin flow pressure were proposed accurately. Good agreement was found between theexperimental result s and numerical predictive values. The deduced formulations could provide the theoretical basisfor suitably designing RTM filling parameters.