Simulation of stochastic flow considering mesoscale permeability variability during the resin transfer molding process

Abstract This article presents a method to obtain the random permeability field of the single‐layer woven fabric. Specifically, a unit cell model based on actual geometric characteristics of a single‐layer fiber reinforcement is established in the open‐source software TexGen. The local permeability value is retrieved from flow analysis in the software ANSYS/CFX based on TexGen voxel models. Probability distribution of reinforcement permeability is determined from the image analysis. Then, continuous random fields describing the local permeability in the fiber reinforcement are generated based on the Karhunen‐Loève (K‐L) expansion method, and suitable dimension‐reducing techniques are employed to represent all the random fields in the physical system. Furthermore, influences of the selected correlation lengths on the random field are explored. Finally, it is demonstrated in the flow numerical simulation that the stochastic flow model indeed more qualitatively and quantitatively agrees with the radial injection experiment than the traditional basic model.