monitoring and simulation of the vacuum infusion process

The vacuum infusion (VI) is a relatively cheap composite manufacturing process which is widely used for the manufacturing of large scale structures in a number of industries, in particular the aerospace, marine and wind turbine industries. The process has to be monitored in order to ensure the quality of the final products. In this study, a monitoring setup involving relatively cheap thermocouples is utilised for the purpose of monitoring of the novel fire retardant resin systems in the VI process. The setup provides a number of variables to be used in the simulation of the vacuum infusion process using PAM-RTM software