Description
Wind turbine blades are manufactured by vacuum-assisted resin infusion. As they grow in size, their manufacturing becomes more complex. Liquid resins need to infuse through fibrous reinforcement materials but also through consumable materials and other pre-cast elements, and ensuring consistent manufacturing quality is challenging. VARI experiments carried out on different configurations of fabric and release film highlighted the effect of the perforated release film on the flow of resin during infusion. A new approach is investigated to include the perforated release film into existing simulation frameworks, by using an equivalent homogeneous porous material. The results, though incomplete, indicate that the equivalent through-thickness permeability calculated for the release film seems underestimated, and further work would be needed to correct this deviation. A criterion based on the perforation pattern and the fabric properties is formulated. It serves modelling purposes, to determine in which configurations the porous-equivalent approach can be used, but also manufacturing purposes, as among the configurations studied, the ones meeting the criterion were lesslikely to present defects than the configurations not meeting the criterion.
| Period | Jan 2023 → Jul 2023 |
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