Abstract

Three dimensional woven architectures of continuous fibres give the possibility to add a 3rd direction of reinforcement with the addition of yarns interlacing through the thickness. The additional benefit of this interlacing yarn through the thickness is to improve damage tolerance properties. However, this opportunity of adding a 3rd dimension to the weave pattern creates an extremely wide variety of possible combination of interlacement which renders classical methods of screening based on physical prototyping extremely costly and time consuming for material developers and engineers. To support the development of 3D woven composites and to provide the industry with a quick screening of potential weave pattern properties that meet the mechanical specifications, numerical simulation tools must be proposed to designers to analyze and predict stiffness, failure and thermo-mechanical behavior of any 3D woven representative volume element (RVE). A complete multi-scale workflow is proposed, starting from the constituents’ properties to quickly provide the effective properties of each weave pattern under consideration. In addition to the workflow proposes, the possibility to generate an ideal geometry of the weave pattern or to import a realistic weave pattern describing better the manufacturing steps will propose a more accurate variation of the yarn properties. Variable properties of the yarn are computed using the local fiber volume content in the yarn cross-section. The proposed approach will be able to allow for elasticity and plasticity with failure in both contexts. Finally, the weave pattern problem can be solved, either using a FFT solver (Fast Fourier Transformation solver) allowing a generation of the engineering constants in an extremely efficient and fast process or either using the finite-element method which is able to accomodate non-linearity with failure to be predicted accurately. In the presentation the efficiency of the proposed workflow will be illustrated by applying it on real weave patterns.