Micromechanics-based modeling of woven composite materials

Textile composites are widely used in advanced structures in the aerospace, aviation, rocket, automotive, and marine industries. The manufacture of textile composite is becoming highly automated. Predicting the effective mechanical properties of textile composites is essential. To this end, finite element, analytical and numerical methods have been developed. In particular, the high-fidelity generalized method of cells (HFGMC) is one of these methods. The HFGMC is a micromechanical analysis, which is capable of predicting the effective elastic properties and thermal expansion coefficients of textile composites (in this case, plain weaves), as well as the local stress and strain fields in the individual phases. To this end, a repeating unit cell of a composite is isolated and analyzed. Results obtained for a balanced and unbalanced plain weave via the HFGMC, were found to be in good agreement with those obtained by experiments, as well as the finite element and semi-analytical methods.