A Fast Numerical Method for Isothermal Resin Transfer Mold Filling,

Abstract

An efficient numerical scheme is presented for simulating isothermal flow in resin transfer molding (RTM). The problem involves transient, free-surface flow of an incompressible fluid into a nondeforming porous medium. A new variant of the control volume finite element (CVFE) algorithm is explained in detail. It is shown how the pressure solutions at each time step can be obtained by adding a single row and column to the Cholesky factorization of the stiffness matrix derived from a finite-element formulation for the pressure field. This approach reduces the computation of a new pressure solution at each time step to essentially just two sparse matrix back-substitutions. The resulting performance improvement facilitates interactive simulation and the solution of inverse problems which require many simulations of the filling problem. (MM)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 13, 1994
Accession Number
ADA300940

Entities

People

  • K. D. Fickie
  • R. S. Maier
  • Suresh G. Advani
  • T. F. Rohaly

Organizations

  • University of Minnesota

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Computational Complexity
  • Computations
  • Inverse Problems
  • Mathematical Analysis
  • Mathematics
  • Moldings
  • Resin Transfer Molding
  • Simulations
  • Sparse Matrix
  • Stiffness
  • Structural Components

Readers

  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
  • Linear Algebra
  • Reinforced Composite Materials