Numerical analysis of the vacuum infusion process for sandwich composites with perforated core and different fiber orientations.

The vacuum infusion is a process usually applied to manufacture large structures of composite materials, such as wind turbine blades. The specific stiffness and weight ratio required by these structures can be achieved by manufacturing sandwich composites. The forecast by numerical simulation of the resin infusion flow is an indispensable tool to design and optimize the manufacturing process of composite. Present work analyzes by numerical simulation the mold filling process of a sandwich composites, performed by fiberglass plies with different fiber orientations and a perforated core. The flow through a single perforation of the core is analyzed and the influence of the permeability values of fiberglass on the volume flow through core perforations is determined. In order to reduce the computing costs, a transfer function to simulate the flow through the perforations is developed and integrated in the numerical code by computational subroutines. A 3D numerical modeling of a sandwich composite, in which the flow through the core perforations is simulated via computational subroutines, is carried out and experimentally validated.The research work presented in this paper has been carried out under the project "Automation of the global manufacturing process for wind turbine blades (AQ–BLADE)" IDI‐20110154, financially supported by Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) from the Spanish Government