Because of their high specific mechanical properties, composite materials are facing new demands, where the large scale production capacity with low cost became important. Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) constitutes a promising process of composite materials manufacturing. The objective of this work is an experimental study of the infusion process during the manufacture of thick plate by RTM.The materials used in the experiments were: fiber glass fabric and vinylester resin with Butanox initiator and CoNaP accelerator. The preform had 32 layers of fiber glass reinforcements whose dimension was approximately 25,4 mm thick. Two types of experiments were carried out: the first one, to measure the influence of the resin injection system on the processing and the second one, to measure the influence of the amount of resin in the reservoir on the injection processing. By the experiments, we could conclude that the resin injection system and the variation of the amount of resin modified the fulfilling time of the preform and prevented the fulfilling of the preform in the experiments. It was not possible to prevent the phenomenon of race-tracking. The resin injection system and the variation of the amount of resin in the reservoir of injection influence RTM processes.
Composite materials; composite materials processing; resin transfer molding
