Modeling and Simulation of Woven Fabrics and Woven Fiber-Reinforced Composites Based on a Nonlinear Fiber Model

A three-dimensional nonlinear thread formulation developed by the first two authors [1] has been extended in this paper for modeling and simulation of woven fabrics and fiber-reinforced composites of various configurations under arbitrary large deformation. The resultant model accounts for extensibility of the woven fibers in the composite, geometry nonlinearity, tension variation along the fiber, and other nonlinear effects due to the woven composition and large deformation. The new modeling effort includes the development of a contact model for simulating the contact between fibers, which can be used to predict high-fidelity behavior of woven fibers in the composite and their interactions. Matrix model is also added into the composite for studying the coupling between woven fibers and matrix material such as resin. The incremental form of original nonlinear equation is discretized using a finite element method with an iteration scheme. Two numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling technique.