Affiliation: | aSchool of Manufacturing Engineering, Seoul National University of Technology, Seoul 139743, Korea bRobert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Center for Intelligent Processing of Composites, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA |
Abstract: | A transient gas flow method was developed to determine the quality of fibrous preforms in resin transfer molding (RTM) prior to resin injection. The method aims at detecting defects resulting from preform misplacement in the mold, accidental inclusions, preform density variations, race tracking, shearing, etc. Unlike the previously developed method based on steady-state gas flow, the new method allows for the acquisition of continuous time-varying pressure data from multiple ports during a single test. The validity of the method was confirmed by one-dimensional flow experiments. |