Patents

One of the challenges in manufacturing composite structures is to design the suitable infusion strategy. This takes a more complex turn when the structure happens to be cocured with stringers, ribs and spars. This is of more concern when making large integrated co cured aircraft structures with varying thickness, wherein knowledge of the flow front location is required at all times. In case of any voids in the cured part, due to improper wetting or dry patches due to the absence of resin,, the component may get rejected for its operational use thereby causing huge loss. Another critical aspect of a resin infusion process is to ensure that the preform (fibres) is completely wetted by the resin. In addition, during the infusion of a large and geometrically complex part where there are multiple resin and vacuum ports, an optimal infusion strategy is needed based on the feedback on the location of the resin front. Present invention discloses a system and method for realtime monitoring and visualization of resin flow in vacuum enhanced resin infusion technology using network of fibre optic sensors. In this invention, conventional fiber optic flow sensor is used to determine the resin arrival qualitatively. In order to detect resin arrival at multiple locations, using network of such distributed sensors, modular interrogation system (FlowSense16) is designed and developed with available Commercial Of The Shelf (COTS) optical instruments. Subsequent methods software code is also developed to control the operation of the interrogation system and acquire the data from the sensor network.