Design Of The Mould Used By Resin Film Infusion (RFI) And Processing Property Analysis Of RFI Process

Resin film infusion (RFI), a promising composite manufacturing technology, is an attractive process to fabricate large, thin-walled or integral-molded composite components. The lack of fundamental studies on resin systems and mold-fabricating technique, and the hardness to fabricate thick-walled and sandwich components as well, limit RFI to be widely accepted in China. Some effective work, such as the determination of RFI parameters, the simulation of the resin fluidity, the design and assembly of the mold, and RFI molding process, was carried out in the aim of fabricating large integral composite components for high-speed trains. The prime work and some conclusions are listed as follows.1) The Z axial permeability of the fabric layers is the key parameter in the one-dimension fluidity simulation of the resin system. The mold was designed to measure the penetration ration. The results show that the permeability of the glass fabric layers(36~72layers) varies between 0.81×10-12m2 and 2.93×10-12m2, which agrees with the data published in the literature.2) The expression of one-dimension resin fluidity on the basis of Darcy's law was obtained due to the characteristic of resin fluidity. The expression can predict the position of the resin frontier and the pressure distribution in the fabric at different time. The results are validated by experiments.3) The FRP mold with embedded heating device was fabricated after the selection of materials and the design. It is shown that the heat flows from the heating layer to the mold surface by means of heat transfer mode after studying on the heating ways and the mold structure. The properties of the FRP mold was also studied after cyclic heating at 80℃for a long time. Some work was carried out to study the processing properties of the FRP mold.4) The metal plate mold was fixed, and the experiment was also designed to determine how the negative pressure, resin film, infusion temperature and infusion time affect the mechanical properties of the sample. It is shown that the fiber content reaches 50% when the negative pressure is 0.1MPa. The thickness of the plate sample varies within 10% of the average thickness. With the vacuumizing time going on, the thickness tends to the average.