Assessment of a Computationally Efficient Method for Industrial Simulations of Transient Heat Transfer during Autoclave Curing

A numerical approach for transient computational fluid dynamics analyses of the autoclave curing process is presented, aimed at finding a trade-off between accuracy and computational cost that can make it industry-affordable. A steady-state, conjugated heat transfer analysis is carried out for the simultaneous simulation of solid and fluid regions to obtain a spatial distribution of the heat-transfer coefficient. This distribution and the curing temperature diagram are then used as boundary conditions for a transient heat-transfer simulation of the solid parts only. Results are compared to both experiments and coupled fluid–solid, steady-state conjugated heat-transfer simulations proving that the proposed methodology is accurate and less computationally expensive than a fully coupled, fluid–solid simulation.