Re - Meshing Algorithms Applied to Mould Filling Simulations in Resin Transfer

In injection moulding processes such as Resin Transfer Moulding (RTM) for example, numerical simulations are usually performed with a fixed mesh , on which the displacement of the flow front is predicted by the numerical algorithm. During the injection , special physical phenomena occur on the front , such as capillary effects inside the fibre tows or heat transfer when the fluid is injected at a different temperature than the mould. In order to approximate these phenomena accurately , it is always better to adapt the mesh to the shape of the flow front. This can be achieved by implementing re-meshing algorithms , which will provide not only more accurate solutions , but also faster calculations. In order to represent precisely the shape of the saturated domain in the cavity , the mesh needs to be non-isotropic in the vicinity of the flow front. The size of the elements along the front is connected to the overall accuracy needed for the simulation ; the size in the perpendicular direction governs the accuracy on the position of the moving boundary in time. Since these two constraints on element size are not related , the need for non-isotropic mesh refinement is crucial. In the approach proposed here , the mesh is changed at each time step from a background isotropic mesh used as starting point in the refinement algorithm. The solution needs to be projected on the new mesh after each re-meshing. This amounts to adopting a new filling algorithm , which will be validated by comparison to a standard simulation (without re-meshing) and with experimental data .