Pietro Perego, Linking the mechanical (FEA) response of infusion consumables to their influence on flow behaviour (CFD) for composites manufacturing, Master Thesis Project

Description

As wind turbine blades scale in size, optimizing Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM) relies heavily on high-permeability flow meshes to drive resin infusion. Because the physical characterization of these materials is costly and time-consuming, this study introduces a comprehensive, six-step numerical workflow to predict their in-plane permeability. The multiphysics pipeline integrates parametric virtual reconstruction, structural Finite Element Analysis (FEA), and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to resolve meso-scale fluid transport along orthogonal directions. To rigorously evaluate the methodology, simulations were conducted on two distinct flow mesh materials under two global boundary conditions: a simplified rigid Plate-Plate baseline and a realistic Bag-Plate setup. Crucially, the mechanical model explicitly accounts for the flexible vacuum bag’s deformation into the mesh voids under compaction, a physical behavior validated against 3D Digital Image Correlation (DIC) topographies. This spatial validation confirmed high geometric fidelity, with the normalized deviation between numerical and experimental surface profiles peaking at just 7.5%. The subsequent fluid simulations demonstrated good agreement with physical experiments, successfully capturing both absolute permeability and directional anisotropy, with the realistic Bag-Plate configuration achieving a predictive error margin of just 10%–25%. By successfully capturing these complex mechanics, this integrated virtual pipeline enables the rapid evaluation and optimization of flow architectures without the need for physical prototypes.

Period	26 Jan 2026 → 26 Jun 2026