Capturing the Random Changes in Process Parameters in the Stochastic Grey-box Model of the Flow-Front Dynamics

With the continuously increasing size of the wind turbine blades, the complexity of the casting process and the risk of failures has also increased. The IntegralBlades® vacuum assisted resin transfer moulding (VATRM) production process at the Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy facility in Aalborg, Denmark, does not permit the visual inspection of the process. Hence a sensor system (possibly virtual) for process control and monitoring is highly prized. Furthermore, the effect of material handling, variations in permeability of the casting media and the material (epoxy) properties affect the outcome of the casting process. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the effect of such variations at an early stage of the design process (e.g. during the simulations) of such a sensor system. Therefore, in this paper, we first describe an effective method to simulate the random changes in the permeability and viscosity in high-dimensional partial differential equations based model of the fluid flow. Next, a low-dimensional grey-box (cyber-physical) spatiotemporal model is proposed to capture the effect of random change in permeability and viscosity during the progression of the flow-front. Finally, a numerical case-study is presented demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.