A three-dimensional modelling technique for predicting the linear elastic property of opened-packing woven fabric unit cells

Abstract

Woven fabric has been recognized as one of the widely used materials in the aerospace industry. In order to effectively utilize this material, it is necessary to evaluate its mechanical properties. In this paper a three-dimensional multi-scaled modelling technique has been developed to investigate the linear elastic properties of single-ply opened-packing woven fabrics for pure tension and shear responses. This technique is accomplished by introducing a number of new three-dimensional macro- and micro-blocks. Thus, this technique can be considered as a full three-dimensional modelling technique. In order to verify the capability of this method, some theoretical and finite-element analysis (FEA) numerical studies were carried out for four types of opened-packing woven fabric unit cells. It was shown that there exists a good agreement between the theoretical results and those predicted using the FEA models. The trends of the stiffness and engineering elastic constants with n g , which denotes a warp (or weft) yarn is interlaced with every n g th weft (or warp) yarn, were also investigated. For the in-plane elastic properties, the present results correlate well with those available in the literature.