A continuum constitutive model for the mechanical behavior of woven fabrics including slip and failure

Woven fabrics are used in many applications, including ballistic armors and fabric-reinforced composites. Advances in small-scale technologies are enabling new applications including fabrics with embedded electronics, active yam materials, or microfluidics. In order to facilitate the design and improvement of such applications, we propose a modeling approach that relates the macroscopic response of the fabric to the behavior of the underlying yarns and weave. The resulting continuum model is more computationally efficient than a discrete model that represents every yam or fiber explicitly. Because it is physically based on the fabric mesostructure, the model can be used to predict the behavior of novel fabric designs. It can be easily tailored to a wide variety of different applications through the choice of suitable, physically motivated constitutive behaviors for the components that make up the assumed underlying mesostructure. We first describe a model suitable for slip-free planar deformations of a plain weave Kevlar® fabric in response to in-plane loads. We next extend this model to three dimensional behaviors through the development of an anisotropic shell implementation that includes the resistance of the fabric to bending and twist.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• King, Michael J. (Michael James), 1978-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Simona Socrate.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36192

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36192