Investigation into Resin Infusion Strategies in the Fabrication of GRE Composite Wind Turbine Blade

Common manufacturing material of wind turbine blade is using glass-fiber reinforced polymer composite by vacuum-assisted resin transfer mold. Selecting the right infusion strategy is important to determine the effectiveness of Resin infusion process. Resin infusion strategy is important to achieve good fiber-to-resin ratio and with uniform distribution with the shortest time for mass production and better quality of product. Producing a successful part using Vacuum Resin Infusion can be very challenging due to the complex geometry and predicting the flow front through mold is also a difficult problem [1]. These project objectives are to investigate the effect of infusion strategy on the filling time and flow behavior of resin during mold filling. To achieve the objectives, steps in methodology will be carried out. Firstly by set up the camera video used to capture image of resin flow front progression. The vacuum bag will be mesh with square grid to observe the resin flow front. Then, performing the resin infusion process and record the fill time and flow progression. The result shows that the filling time for strategy A trial 1 takes 90 seconds while the seconds trial takes 95 seconds. Meanwhile filling time for strategy B is 1140 seconds for first trial and 1110 seconds for second trial. The flow lines are traced using AUTOCAD to obtain filled area. The result is compared with theoretical calculation using Darcy’s equation and the graph of theoretical and experimental is plotted. The flow progression of resin is influenced by the distance of resin inlet and vacuum outlet, the pressure drop along the flow and the viscosity of resin used in the infusion process. Based on this project, strategy A from trailing edge of the blade to the leading edge is the best infusion strategy to manufacture GRE composite wind turbine blade.