In summary, the cure process is governed by the physical-chemical processes of chemical reactions coupled with heat transfer with internal heat generation. These features are characteristic of traditional chemical processes that have been modeled by application of the principles of chemical reactor engineering. In general, the cure process models may be generated through the linking of three submodels. The heat generation, the extent of cure, and the viscosity can be generated by a thermokinetic model, which requires physical and chemical data specific to the materials under consideration. The outputs from this model may be used as inputs to, first, a heat transfer model to generate temperature-time profiles and, second, a flow/compaction model to investigate the influence of pressure-time cycles. The heat transfer and flow/ compaction models are specific to the geometry of the part and characteristics of the tooling assembly. Consequently, the part must be specified in terms of shape (e.g., flat plate), dimensions, geometry, and preform composition. These various models can be combined into a computer program based on finite difference (or finite element) methods to predict temperature distributions and cure development at various locations and time. A flow sheet for such a computer program is shown below.
			- The mesh representation (in the top box) varies with the geometry of the part. - Notice that viscosity distributions can be predicted. However, this feature was not bexplored in this treatment.