Paper number 178

EFFECTS OF FABRIC ARCHITECTURAL HETEROGENEITIES ON EFFECTIVE AND SATURATED PERMEABILITIES IN RTM

C. Binétruy and J. Pabiot

Ecole des Mines de Douai, Technology of Polymers and Composites Department
941 Rue Charles Bourseul, 59508 Douai Cedex, France

Summary The purpose of this work is to investigate the effects of fabric architectural heterogeneities on the effective and the saturated in-plane permeabilities of single and multi-layers preforms. To do this, a glass random mat, unidirectional and bidirectional woven glass fabrics have been used to generate different structural heterogeneities and to introduce several embedded length scales into the flow. The proposed model takes into account the large-scale heterogeneity of the reinforcements to determine the hierarchy of local flows by searching possible transverse flows occuring from inter-tow spaces to intra-tow gaps or from certain layers into adjacent layers. Flow vizualizations and permeability characterizations show complicated trend which are simulated with a quite good accuracy by the model. Significant time-dependent effects are observed for thick architecturally complex materials.
Keywords resin transfer molding, mold filling, fabric architectural heterogenity, saturated permeability, effective permeability, model.

Theme : Processing, Integrated Design and Manufacturing

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