The Effective Elastic Moduli of Plane-Weave Woven Fabric Composites by Numerical Homogenization

Abstract

Effective elastic moduli for cross-ply fiber reinforced materials, simulating plane-weave woven fabric composites, are computed by means of a numerical homogenization technique and a simplified two-dimensional model. The fibers are placed in consecutive layers of parallel arrays of fibers and each layer was orthogonally oriented with its two neighbouring layers. Thus, a two-dimensional problem may be considered as a plane strain problem for the numerical solution and leads to the determination of the effective elastic moduli of the composite. The approximations achieved by traditional analytic solutions, which have been already developed for longitudinal and transverse effective moduli of classical fiber reinforced composites, considering also the influence of mesophase between fibers and matrix, introduced by the first author, are compared with the homogenization results by means of numerical parametric experiments.