Three-phase coupling of air, droplets and fibers for the spray molding manufacturing process of polyurethane-fiber-reinforced composites

Abstract

In the present paper the authors present a multiphase flow simulation model of the interaction of a droplet-laden air flow with flexible fibers. This highly complex flow is occurring during a manufacturing process of fiber reinforced polyurethane based composites, where the liquid plastic polyurethane (PUR) is sprayed with air assistance in a tool form or on a substrate. Simultaneously chopped fibers are laterally inserted in the polyurethane-air spray cone for wetting before the entire mixture deposits on the substrate, where it starts curing. This investigation aims to compute the statistical fiber orientation and density distribution in the final composite, which will help modeling its anisotropic material properties. It is presumed that the final position and orientation of a fiber on a substrate results from its dynamics and coupled interactions with air, PUR-droplets and other fibers within the spray cone. Therefore, we present a new approach simplifying the multiply coupled interaction of the three phases. In this paper a model of the process is built, that computes the transient, 4-way-coupled behavior of the air-liquid droplets mixture with the CFD code ANSYS Fluent and the 1-way-air- and 1-way-droplet-coupled dynamics of the fibers with an extra code called FIDYST. Two approaches for the coupling of fibers with the air-droplets-mixture are presented: One considers the mixture as a pseudo-fluid (" homogenization"), the other computes a force for each of the phases separately, wherein the average momentum transfer for the fiber-droplet collision is estimated based on the probability of local collision events. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.