Cure kinetics of epoxy resin and distributed thermal control of polymeric composite structures moulding
Axenov Vladimir, Olga Alekseeva, Tatiana Vetrova
The goal of this work is the development of mould heating distributed control model for polymerization of the helicopter main rotor blade. Obligatory working conditions of such system control were considering of exothermal heat emanated during a polymerization of epoxy matrix, and change of a thermal capacity at transition from fluid to solid state. The kinetic model of cure epoxy resin designed on basis of DSC - experiments. It is a constituent of the control system synthetic model which includes also heat transfer FEM-based model of a mould with composite spar, and PID-controller model equipped by forecasting module for compensation of a mould thermal inertance. Developped model was shown the good conformity with measured dynamic temperature field in full-scale setup.