WOVEN COMPOSITES: AN ANALYTICAL APPROACH

Abstract

The textile composites have tremendous use in the aerospace, marine, sports, ballistic and automobile industries. It is owing to the fact that these fusion leads to higher strength to weight ratio, excellent impact resistance and corrosion resistance. These composites can also be drawn into complex shapes and curvatures which makes them easy to use. The information regarding mechanical properties and behaviour of the material and its compounds is foremost before using them. The modelling of weave architecture is very tedious due its inherent complexity in geometry. With some assumptions this problem can be made simpler and easy to analyze. The pioneer in the modelling of geometry of yarns was Pierce back in 1937 and after that several models have been developed. Broadly models can be categorised into analytical, semi-analytical and numerical. In this dissertation report the work is divided in four sections, in the first section homogenised material properties has been obtained using modelling aid TexGen and ABAQUS. In the second section the elastic in plane uniaxial tensile modulus of 2D PWF composite has been predicted, in the third section the elastic out of plane tensile modulus of the 2D PWF composite has been predicted and in the last section the elastic out of plane shear modulus of 2D PWF composite has been predicted. The predicted value fairly correlates with the experimental value given in the research paper. The finite element analysis is also performed to obtain the effective material properties of composite. The predicted value using analytical model fall well within range with values obtained using FEM. In the analytical model yarns has been idealized as curved beam and the waviness is depicted using sinusoidal shape function. The matrix material has been assumed as isotropic and yarns as transversely isotropic in nature. The major calculations in the analysis have been done using mathematical aid MAPLE.