Numerical simulation of liquid composite molding processes

This work proposes to perform an analysis about the numerical simulation of LCM processes. After a description of the modelling context of these processes, our first part will describe the formulation of the laws, and a second step the application with the ThermoHydro-Mechanical coupling. We present a finite element procedure to simulate mold filling in the three dimensional case. The method presented in the paper is div-conform i.e. the mass of injected fluid is proved to be perfectly conserved. Numerical results are compared with experiments. In order to take into account the micro-macro voids during the filling of the reinforcement, we introduce a phenomenon of transport in saturation corresponding to a mechanism of hydrodynamic dispersion. This study is supplemented by a study of coupling between processes and mechanical properties, insisting on the advantage of introducing the concept of saturation.