| Thick structural composite parts often use press curing with closed-cavity tooling for achieving dimensional tolerances. A commonly encountered defect for these parts is fiber waviness, which limits its structural strength. The yield for such parts often suffers due to trial and error methods used to develop successful cure processes. In addition, yield for these parts suffers due to material variation. The objectives of this research were to: develop and validate a simplified yet practical cure process model for press cured thick composite parts, utilize the model in order to seek time-efficient optimized cure processes, investigate the effects of material variation on optimized cure processes, and to utilize the model to investigate the origins of fiber waviness. The model was found to indicate the conditions under which it is likely that fiber waviness occurs. |
