Non-isothermal flows in porous media with curing

Abstract

The motivation for this work arises from the study of the processes involved in the manufacturing of a class of composite materials, in particular, those that are obtained by injecting a resin through a porous preform. A one-dimensional model that describes the non-isothermal filtration of an incompressible fluid is presented, and it also includes the possibility of curing, i.e. the polymerization of the penetrating resin. It comes out a fully coupled system consisting of the heat diffusion equation, Darcy's law and an equation related to the kinetics of the chemical reaction. The system is regarded as a free boundary problem for the heat equation with non-constant discontinuous coefficients. Its weak formulation is studied and the local existence of solutions is proved.