Time-Variant Simulation of Multi-Material Thermal Pultrusion

Abstract

Pultrusion being the viable and economical process for producing constant crosssection composite products, many variants of it are being tried out. This paper embarks on the pultrusion with multi-materials; typically of polymer foam/glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) sandwich panels. Unlike conventional composites pultrusion, this process with more than two material phases, one of them dry, poses a challenge in simulating the thermal cocuring within the die. In this paper, the formulation and development of three-dimensional, finite element/nodal control volume (FE/NCV) approach for such multi-material pultrusion is presented. The numerical features for handling the dry-wet material interfaces, material shrinkage, variations in pull speed and die heating, and foam-to-skin thickness ratio are discussed. Implementation of the FE/NCV procedure and its application in analyzing pultrusion of polymer foam/GFRP sandwich panels with multi-heater environment are presented.

Manufacturing and Processing of Polymer Composites

“…The entire impregnation and curing process, especially the very important pulling, has to be optimized and controlled to derive a good product quality [15]. The pultrusion process can also be improved by means of simulation using finite elements or neural networks [16][17][18][19].…”

Pultrusion of a vertical axis wind turbine blade part-I: 3D thermo-chemical process simulation

“…Transient and steady state temperature and cure degree profiles of the composite and the heating die systems during the pultrusion process have been simulated by using numerical techniques such as the finite difference (FD) method and the finite element (FE) method with the control volume (CV) technique or nodal control volume (NCV) technique [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. In [5], the effects of the thermal contact resistance (TCR) at the die-part interface on the pultrusion process have been investigated by using the CV/FD method and it was found that the use of a variable TCR is more accurate than the use of a uniform TCR for simulation of the process.…”

“…In literature, there have been several numerical analyses for the pultrusion of relatively simple geometries [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Generally, thermo-chemical analyses [5,6,8,11], flow simulations [4,18] and optimizations [7,10,13,19] have been performed using numerical modelling techniques. Material behaviour, transport phenomena, material properties and process models need to be well defined in order to properly simulate the pultrusion process.…”

Reliability Estimation of the Pultrusion Process Using the First-Order Reliability Method (FORM)

“…There have been several studies related with the thermo-chemical simulation of the thermosetting pultrusion process [2][3][4][5][6][7]. Since pultrusion is a continuous process, the steady state temperature and the cure degree profiles inside the heating die play an important role for the characterization of the process quality.…”

“…Since pultrusion is a continuous process, the steady state temperature and the cure degree profiles inside the heating die play an important role for the characterization of the process quality. In [2][3][4][5][6][7], the overall goal was to obtain these profiles and provide a better understanding of the process for the composite manufacturing industry. Beside the numerical studies, experimental studies of various composite profiles have been carried out in [8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”