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Re-Meshing Algorithms Applied to Mould Filling Simulations in Resin Transfer Moulding

Centre de Recherches Appliquées Sur les Polyme'res (CRASP) Département de Génie Mécaniquécole Polytechnique de Montréal H3C 3A7 Canada, Laboratoire de productique Département de Génie Mécanique Université du Québec a' Trois-Rivie'res G9A 5H7, Canada

E. Ruiz

Centre de Recherches Appliquées Sur les Polyme'res (CRASP) Département de Génie Mécaniquécole Polytechnique de Montréal H3C 3A7 Canada

F. Trochu

Centre de Recherches Appliquées Sur les Polyme'res (CRASP) Département de Génie Mécaniquécole Polytechnique de Montréal H3C 3A7 Canada

J.-C. Cuilliere

Laboratoire de Productique Département de Génie Mécanique Université du Québec a' Trois-Rivie'res G9A 5H7, Canada

In injection moulding processes such as Resin Transfer Moulding (RTM) for example, numerical simulations are usually performed with a fixed mesh, on which the displacement of the flow front is predicted by the numerical algorithm. During the injection, special physical phenomena occur on the front, such as capillary effects inside the fibre tows or heat transfer when the fluid is injected at a different temperature than the mould. In order to approximate these phenomena accurately, it is always better to adapt the mesh to the shape of the flow front. This can be achieved by implementing re-meshing algorithms, which will provide not only more accurate solutions, but also faster calculations. In order to represent precisely the shape of the saturated domain in the cavity, the mesh needs to be non-isotropic in the vicinity of the flow front. The size of the elements along the front is connected to the overall accuracy needed for the simulation; the size in the perpendicular direction governs the accuracy on the position of the moving boundary in time. Since these two constraints on element size are not related, the need for non-isotropic mesh refinement is crucial. In the approach proposed here, the mesh is changed at each time step from a background isotropic mesh used as starting point in the refinement algorithm. The solution needs to be projected on the new mesh after each re-meshing. This amounts to adopting a new filling algorithm, which will be validated by comparison to a standard simulation (without re-meshing) and with experimental data.

Key Words: resin transfer moulding • simulation • finite elements • anisotropic mesh generation • level sets

Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites, Vol. 23, No. 1, 17-36 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/0731684404028699


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