Pultrusion is a technological process in which fibers impregnated with resin move through the heated die and solidify into a composite profile with a constant cross section, as in the metallic die. The effectiveness and productivity of conventional pultrusion processes, preserving the quality of pultruded profiles, could be improved by process optimization or by the application of new, effective heating sources instead of electrical resistances with high heat losses. Due to the large dimension of the numerical problem and multiple iterations applied for the solution of government equations, an optimization methodology was developed, using the method of experimental design and the response surface technique. To develop microwave-assisted pultrusion processes, as well as pultrusion tooling design and process control, new effective electromagnetic-thermo-chemical finite element models and algorithms were developed by using general-purpose finite element software that results in considerable savings in development time and costs and makes available various modeling features of the finite element packages. The effectiveness and productivity of the optimized conventional pultrusion processes and the developed microwave-assisted pultrusion processes are estimated in comparison with the real pultrusion processes used in laboratory and industrial shops.

Pultrusion is a continuous and cost-effective process for a production of composite structural components with a constant cross-sectional area. To provide better understanding of the pultrusion processes, to support the pultrusion tooling design and process control, as well as to increase a reliability of the simulation results, two alternative finite element modeling approaches using the same continuous model with lumped material properties for the cured composite are developed, compared, and discussed. Each of them is constructed using the general-purpose finite element software ANSYS that results in considerable savings in development time and costs, and also makes available various modeling features of the finite element package. The first procedure is developed in ANSYS Mechanical environment and is based on the mixed time integration scheme and nodal control volumes method to decouple the coupled energy and species equations. The second procedure is performed using ANSYS CFX software with the cure reaction introduced as an additional variable. To demonstrate advantages and disadvantages of the developed procedures as well as to show their accuracy and reliability for the thermo-chemical simulation of pultrusion processes, two- and three-dimensional problems have been successfully analyzed.

A 2-dimensional wavelet transform algorithm employing isotropic Pet Hat wavelet is used to locate the area of damage in a numerically simulated aluminium plate model. To study the advantages and limitations of proposed method, signals of vibrational mode shapes of the plate are reduced by integer numbers to study the performance of algorithm at various sensor densities. Results suggest that the lowest scale of selected wavelet function yields the best damage identification results with a damage location likelihood of more than 98%