JOURNAL OF POLYMER ENGINEERING

 Vol. 22,  No. 3 , 2002, page 155

SIMULATION OF LIQUID COMPOSITE MOLDING BASED ON CONTROL-VOLUME FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Hung-Tzu Chiu and L. James Lee

Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering

The Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA

ABSTRACT

 The control-volume finite element method (CVFEM) is a widely used numerical tool for modeling the polymer molding process because it is more user friendly and more robust than the conventional finite element or finite difference methods. This work compares the accuracy and stability of five upwind schemes of CVFEM for simulating the non-isothermal flow in the reactive liquid composite molding (LCM) processes. The results show that the mass weighted skew upwind (MAW) and the one-point upwind schemes are the most robust for simulating non-isothermal reactive flow in complicated geometry with obtuse triangular mesh. The two-point upwind scheme is inferior to MAW, the one-point upwind, and the SUCV schemes. The exponential and linear shape functions are not suitable for simulating the reactive LCM processes.

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