On the Equivalent In-Plane Permeability

Simulation of RTM processes is usually performed in 2D. Thus, only a mesh of the middle plane is needed with the associated degrees of freedom savings with respect to fully 3D modeling. However such modeling needs the definition of an equivalent in-plane permeability representing the ignored dimension (the thickness). The definition of such permeability is not a trivial task because each ply in the thickness direction can be anisotropic, being the principal anisotropy direction different from one ply to the neighbor plies. In this work we propose a novel fully 3D modeling whose computational cost is equivalent to a 2D solution. It allows addressing properly the equivalent in-plane permeability issue.