Abstract

During past few decades, fabric materials have gained increasing popularity over other design materials due to their high strength to weight ratio and the wider range of design possibilities offered by tailorable material properties. In addition to traditional clothing manufacturing, they find numerous important applications ranging from lightweight ballistic shields (e.g., body armour, aircraft fuselage barriers) to high-strength flexible systems (e.g., parachutes) etc. Due to the increasing demand for fabric materials in diverse applications, it is essential to have tools to accurately predict their macro and micromechanical behaviour. Among many techniques for assessing the anisotropic behaviour in materials with repetitive cell structure, multiscale modelling has proved to be one of the most accurate and cost-efficient numerical methods. Our multiscale model is based on the assumption that on the macroscale the fabric behaves as a continuum membrane, while on the microscale the properties of the microstructure are accounted by a constitutive law derived by modelling a pair of overlapping crimped yarns as a three-dimensional deformable finite strain rod model.