Microwave curing technologies have many advantages in manufacturing fiber reinforced polymer composite materials used in aerospace products, compared with traditional autoclave curing technologies. However, the uneven electromagnetic field of microwave in the cavity of the curing chamber results in uneven temperature on the surface of composite laminates during curing, which has been a major obstacle in industrial applications worldwide. Existing methods attempted to solve the problem by the random superposition of uneven electromagnetic fields, but the results were still not satisfactory to meet the high quality requirements of aerospace parts. This paper reveals the one-to-one correspondence between heating patterns of composite parts and microwave curing system settings, and reports a new concept to solve this problem by continuously monitoring and compensating the uneven temperature distribution in real-time. Experimental results from both fiber optical fluorescence sensors and infrared thermal imagers showed significant improvement in temperature uniformity compared with existing methods.

与传统的高压釜固化技术相比，微波固化技术在制造用于航空航天产品的纤维增强聚合物复合材料方面具有许多优势。然而，在固化室的空腔中微波的不均匀电磁场导致在固化过程中复合层压板表面温度的不均匀，这已成为世界范围内工业应用的主要障碍。现有方法试图通过不均匀电磁场的随机叠加来解决该问题，但是结果仍然不能令人满意地满足航空航天零件的高质量要求。本文揭示了复合零件加热模式与微波固化系统设置之间的一一对应关系，并报告了通过连续不断地实时监视和补偿不均匀温度分布来解决此问题的新概念。光纤荧光传感器和红外热像仪的实验结果表明，与现有方法相比，温度均匀性有了显着提高。