Almost all of chapters 4, 5 and 6 of the entire PhD thesis are published as:
1) Conference paper (Numerical Studies of Integrally-Heated Composite Tooling). Presented in ECCM16, 22-26 June 2014 Seville, Spain.
2) Journal paper (Numerical simulation and design optimization of an integrally-heated tool for composite manufacturing). Submitted 29 April 2014 to journal of Materials and Design for publication, Accepted 10 July 2014 and Available online 1 August 2014.
3) Journal paper (Numerical Simulation and Experimental Verification of Heating Performance of an Integrally Water-heated Tool). Submitted 16 September 2015 to journal of Reinforced Plastics & Composites, Accepted 23 November 2015 and Available online 28 January 2016.
4) Manuscript (Numerical Analysis of the Thermomechanical Behaviour of an Integrally Water-Heated Tool for Composite Manufacturing). Submitted for publication on 31-March-2016 in journal of Composite Structures. Manuscript ID: COST-D-16-00629.Tooling design is crucial for the production of cost-effective and durable composite products. As part of the current search for cost reduction (by reducing capital investment, energy use and cycle time), integrally-heated tooling is one of the technologies available for ‘out-of-autoclave’ processing of advanced thermoset polymer composites. Despite their advantages, integrally-heated tools can suffer from uneven distribution of temperature, variability in heat flow rate and inconsistency in heating/cooling time. This research, therefore, investigates a number of design variables such as shape and layout of heating channels in order to improve the heating performance of an integrally-heated tool. Design of Experiments (DoE) has been carried out using Taguchi’s Orthogonal Array (OA) method to set several combinations of design parameters. Each of these design combinations has been evaluated through numerical simulation to investigate heating time and mould surface temperature variation. The simulation results suggest that the layout of the channels and their separation play a vital role in the heating performance. Signal-to-Noise (S/N) ratio and analysis of variance (ANOVA) have been applied to the results obtained to identify the optimal design combination of the integrally-heated tool. Statistical analysis reveals that the heating performance of an integrally-heated tool can be significantly improved when the channels’ layout is parallel. The shape of the channels has negligible effect and the distance between the channels should be determined based on the production requirement.
According to the predicted optimal design, a developed integrally water-heated tool is manufactured. The actual thermal properties of the constituent materials of the produced tool are also measured. Then a numerical model of the experimental tool model is simulated in ANSYS software, with setting the actual material properties and boundary condition to define the temperature uniformity and heating rate of the experimental tool. Comparison of the experimental and numerical results of the experimental tool confirmed the well assigning of the boundary conditions and material properties during simulation the heated tool. The experimental results also confirmed the predicted optimal design of the integrally heated tool. Finally, in order to define its thermomechanical behaviour under the effective (in service) thermal loads, a tool model is simulated. Numerical results presented that the produced extremes of thermal deformation, elastic strain, normal and plane shear stresses, under the effective thermal loading, are within the allowable elastic limits of the participated materials.Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research of Ira
