English

Abstract

Textile composites consist of interlaced tows, which are impregnated with a matrix material and then cured. The interlacing of the tows offers the potential for increased through-thickness strength compared to conventional laminated composites. However, one disadvantage of textile composites is the difficulty in predicting their per formance due to the complex geometry of their internal architectures. Finite element analysis (FEA) has become an effective means to predict the response of complex textile composite structures. When an attempt is made to perform a conventional FEA, one of the tough issues faced is how to deal with the topologically complex internal geometries. To overcome this difficult issue, a domain superposition technique (DST) has been proposed to implement free vibration analysis of woven composite structures. The significant advantage of the DST over traditional FEA is that it does not need to directly deal with the likely degenerated resin-rich region, thus the DST model is much easier to establish. Numerical results show that DST predictions correlate excellently with traditional FEAs.