Numerical Simulation of a Centrifugal Process to Fabricate Spherical-Alumina Graded Epoxy Resin

A centrifugal method is used to fabricate large-scale functionally graded materials (FGMs) from solid-particles/viscous-matrix mixtures in the room temperature. New simulation method of the centrifugal process, which is developed by the authors, was applied to the practical centrifugal processes employed for the experimental FGM fabrication from spherical-alumina/epoxy mixtures. It is concluded that the cumulative distribution of the filler diameters have to be approximated by the segmented line approximation method to generate the simulated particles in the simulation. It is demonstrated that the dependency of the graded profile of particle packing fraction on both the centrifugal conditions and the total amount of particles loaded is well estimated by the present simulation procedure