A flow-front refinement technique for the numerical simulation of the resin-transfer molding process

The process of mold filling process during resin-transfer molding has been simulated numerically by using a modified control-volume finite-element method (CVFEM) along with a fixed-grid method to handle problems associated with the moving resin front. The fixed grid was refined in an adaptive manner. by dividing the flow-front elements into two regions using the estimated flow front. Imaginary new nodes were placed at the intersections between the original element border and the temporary flow front. By using the mass conservation of resin, the pressures at these newly added 'imaginary' nodes were expressed in terms of the pressure at the old 'real' nodes. Through this elimination, the imaginary nodes do not affect the size of the global matrices and thus do not increase the computation time. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, a number of mold-filling simulations were performed. The proposed method, referred to as the FINE method, yielded smoother flow fronts and reduced the error in the pressure at the flow front that plagued the conventional fixed-grid methods. The solution accuracy was considerably higher than that of the conventional method for the same number of nodal points and elements, without a significant increase in the computation time. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.