Process analysis and simulation of resin injection pultrusion

The Resin Injection Pultrusion (RIP) process has been developed in recent years as a clean pultrusion process in terms of eliminating the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOC). To understand the process and develop an optimization tool using computational techniques, process modeling and numerical simulation were carried out in this study. Material characterization for the fiber reinforcement was conducted in order to provide material data for the process simulation. Models for predicting the compressibility and the permeability of fiber stacks, consisting of fiber rovings and random mats, were developed and implemented in the process simulation code. An analytical flow model was also developed based on the one-dimensional flow approximation for the resin flow in the injection die. This simple model was used to estimate the relations among important processing variables, such as injection pressure, line speed, resin flow, and die geometry. The Control Volume based Finite Element Method (CV/FEM) was used to solve the resin flow problem and simulation results were verified by experiments. Details of the simulation and measurements are presented in this paper.