Lecture - Liquid composite moulding of composites… a zoom on the flow front

Greetings! I would like to invite you to watch my lecture on ‘Liquid composite moulding of composites...a zoom on the flow front’.

HyFiSyn focuses on fibre-hybrid composites, mostly from a mechanical properties stand-point, but we also focus on composite processing, and my lecture is an opportunity to widen the horizon and look at a particular processing method that is close to my heart, called Liquid Composite Moulding, whereby a dry stack of fibers forming a textile preform is infiltrated by a liquid resin precursor. This process is widely used, but the complex phenomena taking place just at the flow front, where the liquid resin is sucked into the fiber network, are not so well characterized so far. In the lecture, I briefly explain the relevant processes and focus on the capillary forces acting at the flow front, related to surface tension effects but also to geometric features. I present methods developed in several groups including ours to evaluate the capillary forces from analysis of unidirectional permeability experiments, in saturated and non-saturated mode, and some methods to modify these forces. I also show recent results on the local observation of the unsaturated flow front, and on the various methods to model multiphase flow as it takes place in composite processing.


If you have any questions regarding my lecture or about composite processing in general, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me at veronique.michaud@epfl.ch

Author: Véronique Michaud