Virtual Weaving Improvements and Virtual Curing of Textile Unit Cell

Researchers:George Barlow, Mathew Schey, Kalima Bukeny

Sponsor: US Air Force Research Laboratory Materials and Manufacturing Directorate

Description: Creating models of textile-based materials with realistic fiber volume fraction has proven to be difficult in the past. This difficulty is generally due to the unentangled fiber used to make up the tows within the textile model not providing as much resistance to compact as the entangled fibers found in experimentally investigated textiles. For this project an entanglement scheme was created to be able to control the among of entanglement within the textile with the goal of creating textile composite models with a more realistic volume fraction response. The entangled textiles are compressed using the Virtual Textile Morphology Suite provided by the Air Force Research Laboratory and University of Dayton Research Institute. The textiles created using the modeling scheme are compared to data collected from scanned textiles provided by a team at North Carolina State University and used for modeling the textiles performance by a team at Texas A&M.