SNAP-RTM modelling for automotive applications

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The transportation industry is showing a strong interest in using high performance polymer composites to achieve weight reductions that can not be achieved with metals. However, the cycle times of the traditional composite manufacturing processes are not adapted to the production of parts in large series. Recently, the development of fast curing thermosetting resins has opened the door to the mass production of composite parts using variants of resin transfer moulding (RTM) and compression prepreg processes. Few works on the manufacture of composite parts for land transport (automobile, trucks, buses) were conducted with these fast resins in an industrial environment in Quebec and even in North America. The reactivity of these resins creates manufacturing and quality challenges for moulded parts, parts design and tooling. The existing process simulation tools must also be modified to take into account the dynamic behaviour of these resins and new physical models of these materials must be developed. This project aims to solve these manufacturing problems, to develop robust, fast and efficient processes for manufacturing high-performance composite parts, to develop tools to model and predict these manufacturing processes and to validate these solutions with the manufacture of a composite demonstrator relevant to the land transportation industry, in order to minimize the risks of adoption of these composite materials by the Quebec and Canadian industry.