• Korea-Australia Rheology Journal
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.193-200
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• 2009

We present a direct simulation technique for two-dimensional mold-filling simulations of fluids filled with a large number of circular disk-like rigid particles. It is a direct simulation in that the hydrodynamic interaction between particles and fluid is fully considered. We employ a pseudo-concentration method for the evolution of the flow front and the DLM (distributed Lagrangian multipliers)-like fictitious domain method for the implicit treatment of the hydrodynamic interaction. Both methods allow the use of a fixed regular discretization during the entire computation. The discontinuous Galerkin method has been used to solve the concentration evolution equation and the rigid-ring description has been introduced for freely suspended particles. A buffer zone, the gate region of a finite area subject to the uniform velocity profile, has been introduced to put discrete particles into the computational domain avoiding any artificial discontinuity. From example problems of 450 particles, we investigated the particle motion and effects of particles on the flow for both Newtonian and shear-thinning fluid media. We report the prolonged particle movement toward the wall in case of a shear-thinning fluid, which has been interpreted with the shear rate distribution.

• Composites Research
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.363-372
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• 2013

Numerical simulation for Resin Transfer Molding manufacturing process is attempted by using the eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM) combined with the level set method. XFEM allows to obtaining a good numerical precision of the pressure near the resin flow front, where its gradient is discontinuous. The enriched shape functions of XFEM are derived by using the level set values so as to correctly describe the interpolation with the resin flow front. In addition, the level set method is used to transport the resin flow front at each time step during the mold filling. The level set values are calculated by an implicit characteristic Galerkin FEM. The multi-frontal solver of IPSAP is adopted to solve the system. This work is validated by comparing the obtained results with analytic solutions. Moreover, a localization method of XFEM and level set method is proposed to increase the computing efficiency. The computation domain is reduced to the small region near the resin flow front. Therefore, the total computing time is strongly reduced by it. The efficiency test is made with a simple channel flow model. Several application examples are analyzed to demonstrate ability of this method.