THREE DIMENSIONAL CURE SIMULATIONS IN RESIN TRANSFER MOLDING PROCESS FOR COMPOSITES MANUFACTURING

The cure simulation is essentially to solve the coupled equations involved in the transient heat transfer and the cure kinetics of the resin. In this paper, the internal heat generation caused by the exothermic cure reaction was treated as the nodal lumped load with the help of the control volume technique. The finite element method (FEM) was employed to solve the pertinent equations. The numerical example of a thick plank solved with the two dimensional FEM was compared with other researchers and good agreement was obtained. A three dimensional simulation for a cylinder with a hole was presented. The results show that the present procedure is numerically stable and reliable when the complex shape problems are involved.