NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF FLOW PHENOMENA IN COMPOSITE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES

This paper presents the development and application of a set of numerical procedures for the simulation of the flow phenomena involved in composite manufacturing processes. The procedures developed are based on a general-purpose finite element package. This not only reduces the software development time and cost but also allows the users direct access to all the features pertaining to the FE package. A number of two and three dimensional simulation examples in pre-heating of tools, liquid composite molding and pultrusion are given to demonstrate the capacity and accuracy of the procedures.