Three dimensional micro-mechanical modeling of woven fabric composites

A three dimensional micro-mechanical model is developed by using a three di mensional geometric model and the variational principles for woven fabric c omposites. The unified modeling strategy starts with developing the three d imensional description of the general woven fabric geometry based on textil e processing science, and then a variational potential energy method and a variational complementary energy method are presented respectively to obtai n the three dimensional stiffness and compliance matrices associated with t he geometric model. This method takes into account the continuity of the ya rn without having to discretize it as previous methods. This study results in new closed form of continuous integration formulae to predict 3D elastic properties for woven fabric composites, which can provide a link between m icro-structural design and macro-structural analysis. The model is validate d by experiments available in the literature [35,36].