Iranian Journal of Chemical Engineering (IJChE)

Abstract Liquid Composite Molding (LCM), particularly the Resin Infusion (RI) process, has become an attractive manufacturing technique for producing lightweight composite vessel hulls with improved structural performance and reduced production costs. Nevertheless, achieving rapid and uniform resin impregnation while preventing dry spots and premature gelation remains a major challenge. This study presents a numerical investigation of the resin flow behavior in the manufacturing of small composite vessel hulls using a two-phase computational fluid dynamics model based on the Level-Set Method. Five resin injection configurations, including cylindrical, fishbone, radial, parallel, and alternating arrangements, were systematically evaluated in terms of the resin flow pattern, filling time, pressure distribution, and gelation behavior. The numerical model was validated against an analytical gelation-time correlation, resulting in the prediction errors of only 2.60% for the cylindrical configuration and 1.35% for the fishbone configuration. Compared with the conventional cylindrical arrangement, the fishbone configuration reduced the gelation time from 127 min to 96 min, corresponding to an improvement of approximately 24%, while achieving complete mold filling before gelation. Among all investigated strategies, the alternating and radial configurations exhibited the shortest filling times of approximately 30 min and 35 min respectively, whereas the parallel configuration required nearly 120 min. Furthermore, the cylindrical configuration filled only about 90% of the mold before gelation. The results demonstrate that optimized inlet configurations significantly improve the resin distribution uniformity, reduce filling time, and enhance manufacturing efficiency, providing practical guidelines for the design and optimization of resin infusion processes for composite marine structures.

Abstract A Laser Induced Fluorescence technique (LIF) has been used to study the mixing behavior of two emerging streams in a T-Type mixing chamber. A mixing index on the basis of digital image light intensities is calculated. It has been shown that averaging over more than 800 images leads to a stable mixing index calculation. Moreover, the effect of equal and un-equal flow rates on the mixing behavior of the streams has been studied. The results show that the histograms of the light intensity changes from double peak (unmixed) to a single peak (mixed) at high elevations of the chamber. Mixing index has a linear descending behavior moving toward the cell front wall and it was shown that the mixing index can be reduced up to 50% moving from cell center to near wall region. Moreover, there is a transition zone in both equal and un-equal fluid flow rates in mixing index. It was shown that the third component velocity play an important role in mixing behavior in T-Type mixing chamber.

Abstract Digital Image Analysis (DIA) has been employed to characterize the time evolution of a bubble injected from a single orifice into a pseudo 2-dimansional gas-solid fluidized bed. The injected bubble diameter increased with the square root of time before detachment. During bubble free flight in the bed, its diameter remains approximately constant. The center of mass of the bubble increases with the second power of the time. The results show that the classical models for bubble injection can predict the time evolution of bubble diameter, and its center of mass. Bubble tends to elongate during injection and after detachment its height to width aspect ratio decreases. Image analyzing results used also for the study of gas leakage from the bubble to emulsion phase, and it has been shown that the dense phase expands up to 1.04 times of the minimum fluidization condition for large bubbles. The expansion ratio of the dense phase increases linearly with bubble diameter.

Abstract The growth kinetics of Lactose particles in a top spray, small scale fluidized bed granulator is studied experimentally and the effects of binder flow rate and concentration, nozzle air pressure and the fluidizing air temperature on the growth kinetics of granules are studied. The results have been explained by the aid of sequentially main effects of each parameter in the process. The effect of each operating variable has been discussed in detail, qualitatively.