Research on VARTM Technology for fabricating Basalt fiber/vinyl ester composites

Basalt fiber has good sea water resistance, heat resistance and sound insulation. This shows that, basalt fiber is ideal material for ship manufacturing. Because of the bad fiber permeability, using VARTM process to produce large basalt fiber marine components still has deficiency. Taking basalt fiber/vinyl resin composite shell as object, research was taken to find the method of improving resin flow velocity and suitable resin injection strategy system in VARTM process. The results show that air release additive contributes to the resin's flow in preform, body, and the tensile strength and flexural strength of components increase with the increase of air release additive's quantum when the quantum less than 0.5%. The resin flow's frontier of the components made by sequence injection strategy is always keeping the same and its velocity is uniform, which makes its quality is better than that made by embranchment injection strategy.