EXPERIMENTAL CHARACTERISATION AND PREDICTION OF ELASTIC PROPERTIES OF WOVEN FABRIC REINFORCED TEXTILE COMPOSITE LAMINATES

Abstract

This paper first introduces the well-established analytical and numerical predictive methods used to calculate the elasticproperties of woven fabric reinforced textile composite laminates. An experimental study follows where an E-glass plainwoven fabric/epoxy composite laminate was manufactured and tested in order to measure the modulus of elasticity and yarndimensions, and also to observe the typical damage patterns. Next, a state-of-the-art textile geometry modelling and a finiteelement analysis software was used in combination to predict the modulus of elasticity of the composite laminate using theexperimentally determined yarn dimensions. Several numerical parameters such as voxel numbers, boundary conditions andelement type were investigated to evaluate their effect on the predictions and the computational cost. Single layerrepresentative volume element (RVE) with full integration formulation provided the closest prediction for the experimentallydetermined modulus of elasticity with an insignificant increase in computational cost. However, more representative damagepatterns were observed with periodic boundary conditions and reduced integration formulation. It is recommended to use thelatter parameters since they provide a more accurate representation of the physical behaviour.