Weighted Residuals Method Applied to the Filament Winding Process

Simultaneous process of filament winding and curing a reinforced polymer is widely used in composite industries. This process is normally used for manufacturing cylindrical structures of the composite materials, which have been used in many fields including aerospace and chemical industries, sports and military. The process consists in winding fibres passing through a resin bath on a mandrel at room temperature so that the resin is crosslinked via chemical reaction. In the chemical step, physical properties of the composite material obtained depend on temperature and cure behaviour; therefore, modelling and simulation of this process are important to investigate the quality of the final process product. The numerical solution of the mathematical model of the filament winding process is the main objective of this contribution. In this work, the modelling consists of the mass and thermal balances by using the autocatalytic model for describing the kinetic reaction rate. The model equation system was solved through the method of lines applying the weighted residuals method to discretize the radial direction and integrating the resulted differentialalgebraic system using the DASSL code. The temperature and degree of cure behaviours were obtained and validated with experimental data. A good agreement between experimental data and simulated results was verified associated with low computational cost. Based on simulated results, the process variables can be optimised aiming to the quality of final product. 2 R.L. Pagano et al.