TY - JOUR
T1 - Zonally heated tooling for moulding complex and highly tapered composite parts
AU - Maes, Vincent K.
AU - Radhakrishnan, Arjun
AU - Kratz, James
N1 - This article was submitted to Polymeric and Composite Materials, a section of the journal Frontiers in Materials
Funding Information:
This work was supported through the Bristol Impact Acceleration Account under the EPSRC grant EP/R511663/1. The support is gratefully acknowledged.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Maes et al.
PY - 2023/3/9
Y1 - 2023/3/9
N2 - Curing of composite material parts often rely on slow cure cycles to manage exotherms and avoid hot or cold spots in the part. This is especially true for larger, thicker and/or geometrically complex parts, which suffer from unevenness in heating between different regions of the part stemming from thickness variations and made worse by the use of convection heating in ovens and autoclaves. An alternative technology for moulding is using heated tooling, which improves the energy efficiency of the process but can also significantly increase the tooling costs. However, the true power of heated tooling is in the ability to tailor the temperature profile in different regions. By introducing zonal heating, significantly faster process cycles can be achieved, hence improving production rates. Using cure simulation, two identical components are analysed, one part produced using convection heating (i.e., oven) and the second made using direct heating (i.e., heated tooling). The zonal approach was tuned based on numerical models and shows a reduction of 17.5% in terms of cure time and the experimental trials found an approximate 45% reduction in energy consumption.
AB - Curing of composite material parts often rely on slow cure cycles to manage exotherms and avoid hot or cold spots in the part. This is especially true for larger, thicker and/or geometrically complex parts, which suffer from unevenness in heating between different regions of the part stemming from thickness variations and made worse by the use of convection heating in ovens and autoclaves. An alternative technology for moulding is using heated tooling, which improves the energy efficiency of the process but can also significantly increase the tooling costs. However, the true power of heated tooling is in the ability to tailor the temperature profile in different regions. By introducing zonal heating, significantly faster process cycles can be achieved, hence improving production rates. Using cure simulation, two identical components are analysed, one part produced using convection heating (i.e., oven) and the second made using direct heating (i.e., heated tooling). The zonal approach was tuned based on numerical models and shows a reduction of 17.5% in terms of cure time and the experimental trials found an approximate 45% reduction in energy consumption.
KW - moulding
KW - tapered composites
KW - zonally heated tooling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85149361958&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/fmats.2023.1126932
DO - 10.3389/fmats.2023.1126932
M3 - Article (Academic Journal)
AN - SCOPUS:85149361958
SN - 2296-8016
VL - 10
JO - Frontiers in Materials
JF - Frontiers in Materials
M1 - 1126932
T2 - 20th European Conference on Composite Materials: Composites Meet Sustainability, ECCM 2022
Y2 - 26 June 2022 through 30 June 2022
ER -