Mass conservation in numerical simulation of resin flow

The finite element/control volume (FE/CV) approach is commonly used for numerical simulation of resin flow in many composites manufacturing processes. The law of mass conservation is sometimes violated with the use of this approach. Especially, when the Galerkin formulation is used with isoparametric finite elements to obtain the pressure field, the balance of resin mass cannot be achieved.In this paper, reasons leading to such mass imbalance are investigated. A numerical model based on material incompressibility is developed to eliminate the problem. A few isothermal flow simulation examples are presented to demonstrate the application of the model. The results obtained are in excellent agreement with the analytical solutions.