Aiming at the thermal overshoot and thermal shell-core effect during the curing of thick composite

a layered self-resistance electric heating (L–SRE) process design method is proposed to alleviate the thermal overshoot

reduce the through-thickness temperature difference

and shorten the curing time. In this paper

a multi-physical coupling finite element model (FEM) of L–SRE process is established to predict the degree of curing and the through-thickness temperature distribution under specific layering process parameters. Based on the FEM

a radial basis neural network surrogate model (RBF) is established. The genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the peak temperature of thermal overshoot

the maximum through-thickness temperature difference

and the curing time during the whole process to obtain optimal parameters. Finally

the optimized multi-layer independent temperature control process parameters are obtained. Based on a multi-channel self-resistance electric heating (SRE) platform

L–SRE curing experiments are carried out. The experimental results show that the peak temperature of thermal overshoot using the new process is reduced to 132.8℃ below the glass transition temperature. Compared with the oven

the overshoot temperature is reduced by 19.7 ℃

which is a 60.6% reduction; Compared with the integrated SRE and the recommended process of L-SRE

the overshoot temperature are reduced by 54.0% and 34.7% respectively. The curing time is reduced by nearly 33min

which is a 19.6% shorter. The optimized L–SRE process parameters can effectively reduce the thermal overshoot and improve the temperature uniformity through thickness.