Meshless methods with application to resin transfer molding simulation

In this work it is studied and analyzed the possible advantages to simulate the mold filling process in Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) with an updated Lagrangian formulation. For this purpose, the well known meshless natural element method (NEM) [1] was implemented to simulate the mold filling process. In this approach, nodes are distributed in the calculation domain, however no mesh is needed to interpolate the unknown functions. This technique presents some advantages over classical finite element simulations (FEM): (1) no remeshing of the transient saturated domain is required at each calculation step; (2) the accuracy of the interpolation is not significantly affected by the nodal distribution. The use of meshless techniques also prevents from having to cope with the numerical instabilities generally associated with the numerical resolution of the transport equations that arise in RTM [2], such as in the heat balance during mold filling or in the equations giving the position of the fluid front or the incubation time at each calculation step. In this paper, the position of the flow front and the geometry of the fluid saturated domain in the mold cavity are handled by invoking the geometrical concept of a-shape for a cloud of nodes [3,4], which allows to extract the shape of the domain being simulated by employing a cloud of nodes only. Numerical examples are presented to show the performance of the proposed new numerical formulation.