Integration of resin flow and stress development in process modelling of composites: Part II – Transversely isotropic formulation

Abstract

Part I of this two-part paper presented the framework to integrate the simulation of resin flow and stress development during the manufacturing process of composites. In the current paper, the integrated approach developed in Part I for isotropic materials is extended to the case of transversely isotropic materials. Various numerical examples are considered in which the results obtained from the integrated approach are compared to those generated from the previously established models for processing induced stress development. These comparisons serve to elucidate the importance of accounting for the spatial and temporal variations in the resin volume fraction during processing and its effect on stress development. Such effects cannot be investigated in a non-integrated simulation environment where volume fraction variations due to resin flow have to be mapped sequentially from the flow simulation onto the next phase of the process simulation which treats the resin as an elastic or viscoelastic solid.