Numerical simulation of isothermal chemical vapor infiltration process in fabrication of carbon-carbon composites by finite element method

The chemical vapor infiltration process in fabrication of carbon-carbon composites is highly inefficient and requires long processing time. These limitations add considerably to the cost of fabrication and restrict the application of this material. Efforts have been made to study the CVI process in fabrication of carbon-carbon composites by computer simulation and predict the process parameters, density, porosity, etc. According to the characteristics of CVI process, the basis principle of FEM and mass transport, the finite element model has been established. Incremental finite element equations and the elemental stiffness matrices have been derived for the first time. The finite element program developed by the authors has been used to simulate the ICVI process in fabrication of carbon-carbon composites. Computer color display of simulated results can express the densification and distributions of density and porosity in preform clearly. The influence of process parameters on the densification of preform has been analyzed. The numerically simulated and experimental results give a good agreement.