Resin Flow of an Advanced Grid-Stiffened Composite Structure in the Co-Curing Process

The soft-mold aided co-curing process which cures the skin part and ribs part simultaneously was introduced for reducing the cost of advanced grid-stiffened composite structure (AGS). The co-curing process for a typical AGS, preformed by the prepreg AS4/3501-6, was simulated by a finite element program incorporated with the user-subroutines ‘thermo-chemical’ module and the ‘chemical-flow’ module. The variations of temperature, cure degree, resin pressure and fiber volume fraction of the AGS were predicted. It shows that the uniform distributions of temperature, cure degree and viscosity in the AGS would be disturbed by the unique geometrical pattern of AGS. There is an alternation in distribution of resin pressure at the interface between ribs and skin, and the duration time of resin flow is sensitive to the thickness of the AGS. To obtain a desired AGS, the process parameters of the co-curing process should be determined by the geometry of an AGS and the kinds of resin.