A stochastic approach to model material variation determining tow impregnation in out-of-autoclave prepreg consolidation

Abstract Material variations are always present even though out-of-autoclave prepregs are machine-made. They strongly determine the consolidation and may eventually lead to voids within the final part, depending on applied process conditions. To capture any contingencies, stochastic differential equations are derived to describe various interacting phenomena in OoA consolidation. In a second step the probabilistic space is discretized using the Karhunen-Loève truncation and the Probabilistic Collocation method is applied in order to use deterministic solvers for flow and compaction problems. The initial degree of impregnation is represented by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process and calibrated with CT-images.