Experimental determination of the transversal and longitudinal fibre bundle permeability

In the resin transfer moulding process, fabrics are very often used as reinforcement. These fabrics consist of fibre bundles. In this context, both the permeability of the macroscopic fabric and the permeability of the fibre bundle are the key parameters to accurately predict the impregnation of the fabrics, the impregnation time and resulting void content. The fibre bundle permeability can be either predicted theoretically or experimentally. Whereas the theoretical determination lacks on accuracy as the realistic packing of the fibres in the bundles is not integrated in the models. In this work, we present an experimental setup to measure the longitudinal and transversal permeability of fibre bundles. The results are compared to model predictions.