Formulation of the size reduced unit cell for triaxial braided composites

Xu, M., Sitnikova, E. and Li, Shuguang (2019) Formulation of the size reduced unit cell for triaxial braided composites. 22nd International Conference on Composite Materials, ICCM 2019, , Melbourne, Australia. 11 - 16 Aug 2019.

Abstract

Reducing the domain in the micromechanical FE analysis of periodic structures of triaxial braided composites has been formulated in this paper. A much-reduced unit cell was achieved by utilizing three independent types of geometric symmetries consecutively, including translational symmetry, central symmetry and rotational symmetry. Firstly, two full size periodic unit cells with a realistic internal geometry were specified as rectangular block by translational symmetry along and perpendicular to axial yarn direction; parallelogram block by translational symmetry along three yarn axes in staggered pattern. After application of central symmetry and rotational symmetry, the full-size unit cell of parallelogram block has been reduced into 1/4 domain, even 1/8 domain. Relative displacement boundary conditions for unit cells with reduced sizes resulting from the use of the multiple symmetries have been derived rationally in this paper. Example of a single unit cell is performed to the desired fibre volume fraction by different parameters. The mechanical response of the triaxial braided composites was accurately predicted using meso-scale finite element models. This mode reduces the size of the unit cell to be analysed without compromising useful features of the unit cells obtained purely from periodic conditions, viz. the unit cell can still be analysed with a single set of boundary conditions under all loading conditions and combined loading conditions.

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Contributors

Author: E. Sitnikova

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