This article discusses several aspects of the curing process in polymers. First, we collect experimental data for an Araldite epoxy resin and calibrate the classical model of Kamal–Sourour. It is shown that there are strong correlations between the parameters in the material parameter identification process. Thus, a curing kinetics model with reduced number of parameters is proposed, which is calibrated to the experimental test data. Second, the model is implemented into a finite element program. Here, high-order, time-adaptive time integration schemes are chosen to treat the inherent instability resulting from the curing kinetics model. Since the curing variable determines the heat source in the heat equation, a particular finite element approach is applied. After the spatial discretization, we arrive at a large system of ordinary differential equations, where the diagonally implicit Runge–Kutta method in combination with the Multilevel-Newton method is chosen, which can be seen as an analogy to internal variable theories in nonlinear quasi-static finite element approaches. Temperature and curing-dependent heat capacity and heat conductivity are considered as well. Numerical examples and a new validation experiment conclude the investigations.

中文翻译：

---

环氧树脂固化过程的有限元建模与仿真

本文讨论了聚合物中固化过程的几个方面。首先，我们收集了Araldite环氧树脂的实验数据并校准了Kamal-Sourour的经典模型。结果表明，材料参数识别过程中各参数之间存在很强的相关性。因此，提出了减少参数数量的固化动力学模型，并根据实验测试数据进行了校准。其次，将模型实施到有限元程序中。在这里，选择高阶时间自适应时间积分方案来处理由固化动力学模型导致的固有不稳定性。由于固化变量决定了热方程中的热源，因此采用了一种特殊的有限元方法。在空间离散化之后，我们得到了一个大的常微分方程组，在其中选择了对角隐式的Runge-Kutta方法和Multilevel-Newton方法相结合，可以看作是非线性准静态有限元方法的内部变量理论的类比。还考虑与温度和固化有关的热容量和导热率。数值示例和新的验证实验结束了研究。