A FAST NUMERICAL METHOD FOR ISOTHERMAL RESIN TRANSFER MOLD FILLING

An efficient numerical scheme is presented for simulating isothermal flow in resin transfer molding. The problem involves transient, free surface flow of an incompressible fluid into a non-deforming porous medium. A new variant of the Control Volume Finite Element (CVFE) algorithm is explained in detail. It is shown how the pressure solutions at each time step can be obtained by adding a single row and column to the Cholesky factorization of the stiffness matrix derived from a finite element formulation for the pressure field. This approach reduces the computation of a new pressure solution at each time step to essentially just two sparse matrix back-substitutions. The resulting performance improvement facilitates interactive simulation and the solution of inverse problems which require many simulations of the filling problem. The computational complexity of the calculation is bounded by O(n2’’), where n is the number of nodes in the finite element mesh. A 100-fold speedup over a conventional CVFE implementation was obtained for a 2213-node problem