Publication

The paper addresses process modeling of advanced composites using Liquid Resin Infusion (LRI) of dry textiles. In fact, prepreg composites give superior mechanical properties due to toughened resins well dispersed in carefully controlled fabric architecture, but suffer from high material costs, limited formability, complex/expensive manufacturing and limited shelf life. LRI technologies can overcome these limitations, but are notoriously difficult to infuse in a predictable manner, thus requiring difficult, costly, experimentation of alternative infusion strategies, cf. ref. [1]. Two-phase porous media theory is exploited along the lines set out in [2] in order to describe the flow of the resin within the saturated region lw, as depicted in the figure. A large-strain finite element formulation and implementation is developed for the free surface problem based on incompressible constituents using quadratic six-node elements, cf. [3]. Anisotropic permeability and isotropic hyper-elastic material response is assumed for the fiber bed. A major issue is to model the flexible membrane and the shape of the membrane during the infusion process as induced by the pressure free boundary conditions, cf. Figure 1a.