Thermal analysis of large area additive manufacturing resistance heating composites for out of oven/autoclave applications

Additive Manufacturing (AM) of carbon fiber (CF) reinforcedcomposite has received growing attention because of the designflexibility, superior mechanical properties, improved thermalproperties, and weight reduction. Autoclave tooling was provento be a successful application for large scale AM technology. Thecapital cost, and cost associated with heating, and cycle time ina conventional autoclave process is relatively high. Thus, aninnovative design of AM mold with an efficient heating schemeis essential. This study represents an innovative method of theresistive heating of composite molds which does not require aroom size oven for heating during the curing processing.Therefore, it has the potential to reduce the operating costdrastically. For the design validation and feasibility study, weperformed a numerical analysis of the wire embedded and AMmold parts. The goal of this study is to determine and optimizethe thermal behavior of the printed mold with embedded wiretechnology. It is anticipated that the larger distance between theembedded wires along the printing direction (z-direction)increase the cold spot, on the other hand, a close distance of thewire can create the unwanted localize heating, thus melting.Constant thermal properties of the 20 wt.% short CF reinforcedacrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) was used for thesimulation purpose. Thermal characterization was set to 100°Cto avoid the thermal deformation or bulging on the part surface.