Analysis of two‐regional flow in liquid composite molding

Abstract This study investigates the two‐regional flow in Liquid Composite Molding (LCM) with emphasis on the race tracking phenomenon. An equivalent permeability is introduced to describe the flow capacity in the fiber free region. A lumped permeability is also used to further simplify the flow modeling by averaging the flow across the flow direction. Both the equivalent permeability approach and the lumped permeability approach were verified with experiments. It is found that they are capable of modeling the race tracking effects in LCM.