Fibre Volume Fraction and Chamber Length Impact on Detached versus Attached Resin Injection Pultrusion
Resin injection pultrusion is an efficient and highly automated continuous process for high-quality, low-cost, high-volume manufacturing of composites. This research focuses on the impact of the fibre volume fraction and chamber length on resin injection pultrusion. Fibre volume fraction impact on the strength of the final composite is important since higher fibre volume fraction composites generally yield higher strength. Manufacturing composites with higher fibre volume fraction are more difficult because higher fibre volume fractions require higher injection pressures to achieve complete reinforcement wet out and thus yields higher maximum interior chamber wall pressures. In this work the impact of fibre volume fraction on complete wet out of reinforced fibre is investigated in the attached-die and detached-die resin injection pultrusion process with various resin injection chamber length considerations. This work explores the resin minimum injection pressure needed to achieve complete wet out, the corresponding maximum pressure inside the resin injection chamber so as to improve injection chamber design to keep the resin pressure within the injection chamber within reasonable constraints for different fibre volume fractions.